


Penelope Weaving

by FloraStuart



Category: White Collar
Genre: F/M, White Collar Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:58:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 78,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloraStuart/pseuds/FloraStuart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She’s never liked chess, and this is chess played in the dark and blindfolded, and all the pieces are broken glass.</i> Kate’s POV of season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Huge_ thanks to everyone involved in helping me with this. Soteriophobe read an early draft and provided many helpful and encouraging comments; Sholio made the wonderful [art](http://sholio.livejournal.com/479565.html); Kernezelda and LC both provided fabulous betaing and encouragement; LC also provided invaluable information on how parachutes actually work, as well as offering advice on when to just handwave and make stuff up. *hugs to everyone*
> 
> Disclaimers: I do not own White Collar or its characters. I do not own the poems quoted near the end, either. I am also _not_ a trained parachute instructor. Nothing in this fic should be taken as actual instructions for how to jump out of a plane.

“We should buy a bakery.”

Neal leans forward, hands open and resting on his knees, with an increasingly brittle version of that grin that used to make Kate’s heart jump and flip over like a startled bird.

Now it makes her chest ache. She shifts on the bench to block the light from the window, slanting in through dusty blinds to cast a glare on the glass, blurring his face. “A bakery?”

“Downtown Paris.” He has the light of a plan in his eyes, now, and it wins an answering smile from her. Neal isn’t Neal unless he’s planning something. “Little tables on the sidewalk, fresh croissants and a really good espresso …” He trails off at this last, with a look on his face that’s almost indecent.

“Scones and tea with jam and clotted cream …” And she thinks that’s an English thing, actually, but the details aren’t what matter. Once it was a villa in the Cote d’Azur, vineyards and olive orchards, walking hand in hand along a quiet path above the seashore. 

They paint dreams in the play of light and shifting shadows across the glass; neat pictures precise as architectural drawings, at first, as the plans Neal drew up before a heist; gorgeously detailed landscapes, after that; impressionistic scenes followed, washes of color meant only to suggest a view; still lifes as Neal rhapsodizes about small pleasures. They have come, now, to the modern and abstract; what they paint bears little relation to any conception of concrete reality, but points only to some meaning behind it.

“Right in the heart of the city.” They weave possible futures between them, out of an unspooling skein of idle, ragged thoughts and lonely speculation.

“Walking distance from the Louvre. Let’s do it.” She catches the shuttle with the grace of long practice, throws the thread back to him.

Now their plans for a life of distant luxury and fine coffee serve the present, not the future. She imagines they weave a net, each time she comes, to catch him when he might fall without her.

“You’d like France,” he says, and stops. A shadow there; she’s never been to France. He went without her. She refused to go; she left. He ducks his head, physically backing away from it.

“We’ll go.” She smiles, reassuring. The past is past. _We don’t need to talk about that, now._ “Soon as …”

Five months, three weeks, four days and fifteen hours. She doesn’t have to say it; the number beats in the back of his mind, too. Fourteen and a quarter hours. This week’s visit is almost over.

Her dreams are simpler, now; she knows his are, too, though they don’t speak of them aloud. Taking him back to the motel that’s home this week, listening to him breathe all night above the knocks and creaks of the aging radiator; sitting beside him on the sagging mattress, his hands in hers, an intimate moment not recorded or watched by anyone.

After nearly two hundred hours on camera, she can’t remember the last time she spoke to him and said exactly what she meant. Even when they don’t speak in code, they do. He goes on about Paris and she hears _every time I think the food can’t get any worse, it does_ ; she hears _I just might kill someone for a decent cup of coffee_ ; she hears _I want you_ ; she hears _I can’t believe you’re still here, I can’t believe you still want me_ ; she hears _I can’t do this without you_ and _five months three weeks four days fourteen hours_ and _GodIneedyousomuch_.

She dreams of waking to the smell of brewing coffee, the sizzling of frying eggs, the curve of his back, the line of his shoulders as he stands over the stove, stirring hollandaise sauce with all the intensity of concentration he devotes to forging Monet. Kate never had the patience to learn, but she loves to watch Neal cook.

She thinks they’re going to spend the entire first week he’s out in the kitchen. They’ve planned at least six weeks’ worth of first meals in almost pornographic detail. And after that …

The last three and a half years have sanded down their dreams to brittle things, like pages of aged manuscripts they have to shield from light and air. “The good life” can be painted in many different colors, but the only meaning left behind fits in three words: _together, free, safe_.

Anything else is stalling in place, always stalling; weaving plans by day and unpicking them by night; weaving a net each week and waiting for the next time, when it will be all unraveled and they must start again. She’s always loved the classics, but she thinks she makes a very poor Penelope.

She nods, and suggests a few of her favorite pastries their bakery might serve but she’s saying _find me a bulldozer and I’ll knock the damn walls down_ ; she’s saying _I want you, too_ ; she’s saying _five months three weeks four days fourteen hours_ and _I’m not going anywhere I’m right here it’sallrightI’vegotyouI’mrighthere_.

A sharp knock from the guard startles her: five more minutes. She kisses her fingers, presses her hand flat against the glass and she’s saying _I love you_. He mirrors the gesture. _I love you too_.

She doesn’t tell him about the way the guards who used to leer at her now look at her only with pity, like she’s something faintly pathetic. She doesn’t tell him her storage unit got broken into two days ago, or that she wakes up in the middle of the night with an itch under her skin and the dull, ever present fear gnawing her, the fear that she’s been in one place too long.

There is never enough time, and nothing he could do but worry.

“I love you,” she says, when the guard opens the door, and it means _I’m still here_.

“I love you, too.” It means _then nothing else matters_. 

***

She doesn’t cry when she leaves; she won’t leave him on a sad note, not when this visit is the only bright spot to carry him through the week. She won’t give anyone else here the satisfaction. Walking out without hurrying, she passes other visitors waiting; a few young women her age, dressed in professional clothes and wearing their uncertainty like armor, eyeing the rest of the room and trying not to look overwhelmed. A pair of teenage boys slouched against the window, trying with all the desperation of teenagers everywhere to pretend they don’t care.

She nods a greeting toward the cluster of older women by the far wall. Sometime around the beginning of the seventh month of Neal’s sentence, they began to acknowledge her existence. Now they move over and save a space for her, give a stern mother’s glare to anyone who tries to harass her, bring her burnt coffee from the guard station down the hall. They don’t speak, much, which suits Kate fine. But they’ve accepted that she’s one of them, in this for the long haul.

On her way home she stops at a coffee shop, sipping a tiny mug of espresso because she can and Neal can’t and someone should. It seems a crime not to appreciate such things; she sits outside despite the late October chill, draws her coat around her and soaks in the scene. She’ll describe it to him next time, the late afternoon shadows stretching across the street, the lonely tree beside the sidewalk, brown leaves still clinging in patches.

The black sedan with government plates parked across the street.

She sits up, decides to order another espresso (it’s not like she’ll be sleeping tonight, anyway) and wait to see if it goes away. When it’s still there an hour later, she memorizes the plate and decides it’s time to move again.

More for her own peace of mind than anything else; if the FBI wants to find her they don’t need to know where she lives. All they have to do is wait for her in the prison parking lot any Wednesday afternoon. She can move every other month, and she does, but she is still locked in a steady orbit around that place, dragged in by its inevitable gravity.

A narrow alley runs toward the back of the coffee shop; ducking into it, she sees the sedan’s front door open in the reflection from the shop window. At the other end, past an overflowing dumpster, a brick-paved courtyard opens up, dotted with fountains and struggling late autumn flowerboxes. She walks quickly past a line of glass storefronts, eyes turned sideways to watch the reflections behind her, scanning for anyone following.

He's hardly an inconspicuous tail; tall, broad shoulders, pale ginger hair and a dark trench coat that screams "fed" from half a mile off. So they’re watching her. It’s not the first time, and if they had anything on her they’d have arrested her already.

She stops, and he stops some fifty paces behind her, feigning unconvincing interest in a display of designer handbags in the nearest window. Either he’s not very good at this, or he’s meant to be the obvious one.

Ducking into the subway, she glances behind and sees him dropping back; he knows he’s been made. Most likely he’s got backup down here somewhere. She gets on the southbound train. It’s another few hours till rush hour, but the car is still crowded. She notes the people getting on after her; a woman with a green scarf covering her hair, a fortyish man in a battered brown leather jacket, a slightly younger guy with a bad eighties mullet and thick glasses. 

Six others get on after, and she picks out some distinguishing feature to remember each of them. The lights overhead flicker briefly as the train lurches forward, accelerating.

She gets off at the first stop, leans again a pillar and pulls out her phone, keys in a few lines of poetry, pretending to text someone while watching who exits after her. Green Scarf and Leather Jacket both get off; she recognizes none of the others.

When she hears the clattering rumble of another train approaching from the other direction, she crosses quickly toward the northbound track. She recognizes Leather Jacket among the passengers squeezing aboard behind her.

All right, she thinks, you’re on. Let’s do this.

She knows how to play this game.

***

She loses him in Grand Central Station; five transfers later, she’s satisfied no one else is following and switches to the line past her motel. None of the cars in the parking lot are shiny enough to be feds. But just as she’s settling into her tiny kitchen nook with a glass of wine and Cary Grant on her laptop, she glances out the window in the fading light and sees a dark car parked halfway up the block.

Calm down, she tells herself. What would Neal do? 

He’d probably order pizza delivered to the car. Well, that’s no help, except to make her laugh.

They’re going to be out there all night, he’d say. Poor bastards. He’d once sent a bottle of very expensive champagne to an FBI surveillance van outside their apartment on New Year’s Eve. But she has to be frugal, these days, and if she’s going to splurge on pizza (or champagne) she’d rather enjoy it herself.

Yes, it’s definitely time to move again. She’ll call Mozzie tomorrow.

She can't figure out why she’s being followed now. Neal's already in prison, and she's been careful. She's nearly certain they don't have anything on her. She's kept her head down, living off Neal's cash reserves and Mozzie's help and whatever occasional "honest" job she can find where they're willing to pay her under the table and not look too closely at her work history, legal and otherwise.

She'd had brief thoughts of going completely (temporarily) straight while Neal was inside. But her work history from before Neal is still more of a liability than her suspected criminal connections, when it comes to finding a use for the finance degree that was supposed to save her from life as a starving artist. New Yorkers have long memories, and no one wants to hire Vincent Adler's personal assistant.

Vincent Adler had hired her as a favor, at the start of her third year at City College; a good deed for a friend with two years to live and a wayward daughter with five figures' worth of student loan debt, half a useless art degree, no marketable skills and no future prospects. So her father had told it. Though he'd left out the first part until it was closer to two weeks.

She’d been prepared to hate Adler. She’d been furious with her father for his high-handed “rescue”. It had started with an irate phone call from her boss at her crappy waitressing job, telling her good riddance and what did she think she was doing, quitting with half a day’s notice and that given by her father, couldn’t she have had the guts to tell him herself, and he’d hung up on her before she could protest that she had no clue what he was talking about. 

Fifteen minutes later her father appeared at the studio loft she shared with three other art majors, telling her pack her things, they were going downtown to buy her a professional wardrobe before he dropped her off at her new apartment, hurry up now, we have to get this done before it gets too late, you start your new job at eight o'clock tomorrow and you want to get a good night's sleep, and by the way I called the registrar and you've switched your major to finance. This, after she'd asked to borrow money for rent for the first time after two years' scraping by asking for nothing.

When she’s being honest with herself, she can admit she wouldn’t have lasted much longer as a starving artist anyway. And Adler didn’t make anything easy for her. He made it clear from that first summer he expected her to learn quickly.

She bit back a chilly response, the first time he turned the conversation toward art, accustomed to her father’s fond exasperation at her naivete or her former classmates’ frozen contempt for a sellout. But Adler talked about art like it was an exciting and interesting topic of conversation, a subject on which all civilized people ought to have at least some opinion. He didn’t bring it up to humor the poor silly girl who wasted half her college career on a useless major, nor did he treat it like something that had to be your whole life or you were unworthy of it. He treated her like an adult capable of doing a difficult job well, and consulted her opinion on aesthetic taste like it was something that mattered.

It took her a few months to stop feeling guilty about the realization that she didn’t want to live in a freezing garret and drink instant coffee and die young of some wasting disease like the Victorian poets her classmates imagined themselves to be. She’d been ashamed of her own relief at not dreading the end of the month, of picking out what she wanted to eat at the store instead of only what was cheapest. Of treating herself to an expensive latte simply because she’d had a hard day.

She hardly spoke to her father, after she started working for Adler, aside from three or four awkward phone calls. A few more months, she knew, and she would have come around to his point of view on her own, if he hadn’t forced the issue; then it would have been her decision.

I wanted to see you settled and on your feet while I could, he'd said near the end, and her tears were real but she'd gritted her teeth and lied when she told him all was forgiven. Thinking, you bastard, you couldn't have told me a year ago that you were sick, two years ago, given me time enough to understand and to process, to forgive you for real?

(This is another thing she and Neal have in common; they don't talk about their parents unless they're both very, very drunk. She can count the occasions they've been that drunk on one hand and have more than three fingers left over.)

Adler drove her home from the hospital, the night her father died. That was in late October of 2000. He left her at her door without any useless words of sympathy, only an offer to help with funeral arrangements. (There was no one else.) 

Kate's mother is an artist; she left when Kate was six and hasn't been heard from since.

(My mother is a liar, Neal will say. I come by it honestly, he'll say with a wrecked little smile, and it really isn't funny at all.)

One night three years later, three months after she learned his real name and what was left of her safe world fell apart, she and Neal drank five bottles of wine that cost more than she wants to think about and she told him the whole story; more like she ranted wildly at him until the neighbor started pounding on the wall and Neal caught her in his arms and didn't let go, not when she fought him, not when she started shrieking curses into his chest, and they'd ended up in a tangled huddle on the floor in front of the couch and he'd held her on his lap until the room stopped spinning and she was too exhausted to cry anymore. 

Sometime later, after her leg had fallen asleep and her ass gone to pins and needles and her neck ached where her head was tucked under his chin, he'd started to talk. In a soft, dead voice, without raising his head, the words muffled, his lips never leaving her hair, his arms squeezing her tighter.

(Neal's father killed a man; he drove his partner and his family into witness protection. Neal's father left the pistol he used behind when he disappeared; Neal spent his teenage years training with it, while his mother spun lies about a hero's death.)

The next evening they'd left a basket of homemade cookies and a bottle of expensive port on the neighbor's doorstep in apology, and never spoke of any of it again.

(Neal hates guns. Kate doesn't blame him.)

In February 2001, Adler sent her to negotiate a price for a Matisse he wanted to buy. He gave her his calendar and expected her to stay on top of his schedule; he trusted her to screen calls, to deal tactfully with investors, many with large accounts and larger egos, competing for a piece of his time. In July he was there at her graduation, proud and affectionate while maintaining a proper distance. In September he found her a hotel room half a block from the office, while her entire street was closed off and smothered under a blanket of ash, and through some connections she never understood sent someone to get her laptop and her sketchbook and an overnight bag from her apartment more than a week before anyone else was allowed near the building.

In 2003, he gave her his warm congratulations and a list of business contacts in Chicago when she turned in her resignation, with the promise of a glowing reference; less than a week later, when she told him she and Michael had split up and she wasn’t moving after all, he gave her back her old job without question.

Three months after that he disappeared with over a billion dollars of his clients' money, including all her savings, while his investment firm, revealed as a giant Ponzi scheme, folded in on itself like the house of cards it had always been.

Neal told her his real name, that day. He told her they’d be all right, they’d get it all back, everything they’d lost. Not long after that, Kate decided there were two kinds of people in the world, and she was done being one of the marks.

***

Halfway through the next morning’s first cup of coffee, she hears a knock at the door. She opens it cautiously, half expecting to see Leather Jacket on her doorstep. Instead, it’s Captain Obvious in the trench coat.

“What do you want?”

“Kate Moreau?” When she only inclines her head without answering, he pulls a badge and flips it open. “Garrett Fowler, FBI. Can I come in?”

She leans forward to squint at the badge, when he would have put it away. “Do you have a warrant?”

“Why? You got something to hide?”

He’s easily half a head taller than her, and he’s leaning into her personal space in a way that’s meant to force her to step back or look up to meet his eyes. She decides to go with the latter. “You didn’t answer my question.”

A faint smirk plays around the corners of his mouth. “You talked to Neal Caffrey lately?”

“What, you can’t pull visitor logs from Sing Sing?” When he doesn’t respond, she shrugs. “I was there yesterday. As I’m guessing you already know.”

“I need to ask you some questions.”

She pulls the key from the hook by the door, grabs her coat and steps onto the landing, locking the room behind her. “We’ll talk outside.”

Weak sunlight shows through the low white ceiling of clouds; soon they’ll see snow. Out back there’s a swimming pool, drained for the winter with a crumpled tarp in a heap on the floor at the shallow end. A green hose curves across the concrete deck and drops over the side; the sloping floor is splashed with algae stains, rust-brown water and dead leaves pooling by the wall. A sudden gust of wind scours the cracked parking lot, slaps at the tarp, rattles the chain link fence.

They sit on white plastic chairs at a plastic table that tilts toward her when she leans on it. “Should I be talking to a lawyer?”

“I don’t know, should you?” 

“You’re almost as good as Neal, evading a direct question.”

His eyebrows go up, then down, again with that little smirk. “You and Caffrey have been close for a while.”

She doesn’t respond, waiting for a question, or for something she doesn’t know.

“He got four years for bond forgery, but we both know a lot of thefts attributed to him were never resolved. A substantial number of paintings and manuscripts and other artifacts connected with him have never turned up for sale, have simply dropped out of sight.”

Kate pulls on her gloves, crossing her arms and shoving her fists into her armpits. “I’m still waiting for a question.”

He leans forward, and the table lurches away from her, scraping the concrete. “Where are they?”

She blinks and huffs a laughs, breath condensing in a swirl of frost. “Are you serious?”

“He’s got it all hidden somewhere. If he told anyone, I’m guessing it would be you.”

“That’s a fascinating theory, Agent Fowler.” They can’t know about the cache in San Diego. He’d have said something, if they did. “But I can’t imagine why you think I’d confirm any of it, even if it were true.”

He gives her a chilly little smile. “It’ll go better for Caffrey if you help us.”

She leans forward, elbows on the table as it tips back in her direction. “Do I look like an idiot?”

“We’re just trying to return what’s been stolen to the rightful owners. And we will find what we’re looking for.” He flips a business card across the table toward her. “If you happen to think of anything, call me.”

She squints at the card. “Office of Professional Responsibility? That’s like FBI internal affairs.” She frowns at him. “Wait, are you investigating _Burke_? How is this even your case?”

“Think about it,” is all he says, standing at last. “I’ll be in touch.”

***

Mozzie answers on the third ring.

“This isn’t a good time.”

“Tough. I need to see you.” Silence. She stows the laptop in her go bag, jams the phone between her ear and shoulder and pulls out a knife. Unlocking the bland oceanscape from the wall above the bed, she retrieves an envelope with a thousand in cash from the back of the frame. “Can I come by tomorrow?”

An outlet cover behind the nightstand comes loose to reveal four fake passports and associated credit cards; she tucks these and the cash into a flat belt pouch and pulls a loose sweater on over everything.

“Tomorrow’s no good,” Mozzie says. “Saturday at five.”

“Oh, come on, Moz.” Tomorrow is Friday, and Friday is luxurious as clandestine bolt holes go; Saturday is an unheated storage unit by the water and smells like dead fish. When he doesn’t relent, she sighs. “Fine, I’ll see you then.”

She hangs up and pulls the battery out of the phone, slipping it into her coat pocket. A quick walkthrough of the room reveals nothing incriminating left behind, before she locks the door behind her.

“Someone was in your unit last night.” Mozzie opens the door before she can knock, doesn’t bother with a greeting. He’s a reassuring sight, bundled in a faded coat with that battered tweed cap with the ear flaps pulled down.

“I know.” She doesn’t ask how he knows. Mozzie knows things; it’s part of what makes him Mozzie. “I was over there day before yesterday, on my way to the park.”

“Not that one.” Mozzie gestures sharply, _get in here already_. “The one in Queens.” He frowns. “Wait, somebody got into the other one, too?”

_He’s got it all hidden somewhere_. She ducks inside the room, folding her arms against a sudden chill. There’s nothing in the one in Queens. Not anymore. But two break-ins within a week, two different units on opposite sides of the city? This isn’t random.

This is the FBI, and they’re looking for something.

“I brought dinner,” she says, setting down a paper bag with Chinese takeout on the long cardboard box sitting, coffee-table-like, in front of the couch. Mozzie’s wine selection is reliably superb, but he stocks his safe houses with the sort of food that would survive a nuclear apocalypse.

“Excellent,” Mozzie says, temporarily distracted. Then, “You really should think about moving.”

“That’s why I’m here. I need a new place.” She considers telling him about this morning’s visitor, then decides she doesn’t need to fuel his paranoia. Not yet, at least.

“There’s a whole row of empty units on the other side.”

“A new place with running water, Moz.”

“Bathroom’s in the office next door. They keep it locked at night, but I’m assuming you brought your tools. I disabled the security camera.”

“Please.” The smell of dead fish is slightly less pervasive with the door closed, but the temperature is still dropping as the sun sinks outside. It’s hardly more than a large closet, one of hundreds in this cavernous warehouse, with walls of bare particle board and a single lightbulb hanging from the corrugated iron roof. A stack of crates in one corner forms an improvised wine rack; another stack serves as a bookshelf.

This is an old safe house; there are three sleeping bags piled against the far wall. All of them rated down to fifty below, if she remembers right, and a good thing, too. She doesn’t take off her coat.

“Fine, I’ll ask around in the morning. But you’d better stay here until I have a chance to sweep it.”

Some days, Mozzie’s paranoia is amusing; some days it’s frustrating as hell. And then there are times like this, when she’s comforted to know Mozzie is here to go over every inch of her new place with his collection of Russian military surplus scanners to make sure no one’s bugged it.

She wouldn’t put it past Fowler.

She sits on the couch as he opens a bottle of good Cabernet, moves to prop her boots on the cardboard box then decides against it - for all she knows, it’s full of something explosive - and folds her legs up beside her instead. Aging springs sag toward the center. 

It’s not the old couch they used to fight over. Back when she first met Neal Caffrey - some six months after she first met Nick Halden - and moved in to the apartment he shared with Mozzie, they’d staked competing claims on the couch. Whichever of them got home first would stretch out on it, or pile things - notebooks, half-finished canvases, boxes of paints for her, or various items of spiky and dangerous-looking Soviet-era spy gear for him - on the other end so no one else could sit there.

“Let it breathe,” he says, setting the bottle aside. And then, “How’s he doing?”

She lets out a slow breath, watches it condense and dissipate in the cold air, resists the urge to say _he’s living in a concrete box with no windows, how do you think he’s doing?_ This hasn’t been easy for Mozzie, either. They are a tripod, unbalanced and wobbling on only two legs.

“He says the food sucks.”

“He always says the food sucks.”

“Well, I’ll make sure to tell him next time I see him that he’s boring you.” That comes out with more of an edge than she’d intended. She sighs, and gestures at the paper bag, offering him first pick of what’s inside; a peace offering, of sorts. 

When Neal’s sentence first came down, they’d all decided they’d be safer if one of them stayed out of the system, under the radar and off the cameras. According to every FBI file, Neal Caffrey works alone. He has a girlfriend of decidedly suspicious character, but he’s never had a partner. Mozzie is their ace in the hole; the feds don’t even know he exists.

Mozzie hasn’t seen or heard from his best friend in three and a half years.

“Did you tell him about the break-in?”

“No.” Her voice rises, sharper. “What’s he gonna do, Moz? I’m not -”

She stops herself, fists clenched on her knees, staring at the polished concrete floor for a breath, then two.

Mozzie says, quietly, “Do you really want to do this tonight?”

“No.” She looks up, then, and she knows the weary lines in his face from her own mirror. They’ve had this fight a hundred times and they both know how it goes; it starts with Copenhagen and she left and Burke used her to catch Neal, and goes on through Mozzie never visits and so Mozzie doesn’t know what it’s like and how could Mozzie have let him walk into such an obvious trap, and ends up on since when can anyone stop Neal doing anything. It never really ends; like art, some fights are never finished, only abandoned.

“I don’t care if she followed you home. You can’t keep her,” Mozzie had said the day she moved in with them, as she and Neal staggered up the stairs hauling boxes from her old place.

“I’m not a puppy,” she’d said, stung.

“I know,” he’d said. “A puppy might grow up to be useful someday.”

“Moz, Kate. Kate, Mozzie.” Neal had only shot his friend an exasperated look as he squeezed past the end of the couch into his bedroom, dropping the boxes by the narrow bed. “He doesn’t mean that.” Then, after a pause, “Okay, he probably does, but he’ll get over it.”

He had, to a degree, eventually. And she had mostly stopped taking his lingering distrust personally. Mozzie doesn’t trust anyone. It’s no longer about jealousy or distrust; they’re both past the point of trying to push the other out of his life, both past the point of wanting to. But three and a half years have not reconciled either of them to being helpless. 

Some days they both just need to fight for him, and there’s nothing and no one to fight but each other.

“He said thank you,” she says, abruptly, after they’ve finished eating.

“For what?”

“He said that to Burke. When they caught him.” She looks up, her hands resting loose and helpless on her knees. She’s never told him this. She’s never told anyone. The next words come out sharp and breathless, like ripping a band-aid off. Or reducing a dislocated thumb. “He said ‘thank you, I never would have found her without you’.”

It falls in the silence with all the weight of a confession. She tries, twice, to swallow past the sudden hard knot in her throat. 

Mozzie doesn’t move, doesn’t speak for more than a minute. When he does, the words are gentle, undone. “Wasn’t your fault.”

The weight doesn’t lift, exactly, but something in her chest loosens a fraction; she looks away, fist against her mouth, until she’s sure she’s not going to cry. “Feels like it is.”

“I know.” He pats her shoulder awkwardly, before getting up to pour the wine. “Here.” Leaning back to rummage behind the couch, he pulls out three DVDs and drops them in her lap. “Your turn to pick the movie, before we both freeze to death.”

She sets up the laptop with _The Princess Bride_ , setting aside _Snakes on a Plane_ and _Moon Landing: Fact or Fiction?_ for later viewing. Mozzie turns off the light and only then she lets the tears come, silently. 

He unrolls two sleeping bags, which she decides must have been stolen from Russian Special Forces or a museum exhibit on the Shackleton expedition. Knowing Mozzie, it could be either.

They clink glasses in silence before she hits “play”. _Absent friends._

He takes one earbud and she takes the other; she props herself on her elbows and burrows into the bag, and they can both quote all the lines and Mozzie does the voices perfectly and the only thing missing is Neal.

***

Mozzie is gone when she wakes. Not long ago; he’s left a tall mug of still-warm coffee beside the now-closed laptop. She turns over, lying on her back and breathing puffs of white at the ceiling.

She makes herself sit up before the coffee gets cold, drinking it down quickly and shivering. Something is banging next door.

A quick glance around shows Mozzie didn’t leave breakfast, or any note saying where he’d gone. With Mozzie, one never knew. The banging stops, then starts again. Faintly, she hears a voice calling; the tone is enough to blast any lingering fatigue and push her out of the sleeping bag, even before she can make out the words: “FBI! Open up!”

She pulls on her sweater and her coat. The laptop goes into her bag; she hadn’t taken anything else out of it. She touches her belt; the cash and passports are still there. She’s out the door and halfway down the row, heading for the office at the back of the warehouse, before she realizes she’s still got _The Princess Bride_ in her DVD drive.

_Sorry, Moz._ She’ll replace it later.

By the sound of it, they’re at the warehouse next door. This building is still deserted, and the overhead lights are off; the only light comes from the bright lines of sunlight around the edges of the main front door. They’ll be watching that exit.

She picks the office door lock with practiced speed, locking it behind her again once she’s inside. There’s another door to the outside, and she takes it. Outside, she smells fish and frost; voices drift from the next building, over the faint echoing slap of water along the underside of the pier.

Fowler is easy to pick out, half a head taller than any of the rest of the agents at the door. _Will you look at that?_ she thinks, pressing herself against the side of the building and stepping softly toward the opposite corner. _I’ve got a pet fed of my very own. I’ll have to tell Neal, next time I see him._

She hugs the shadows until she’s put three buildings between her and them, then walks at an unhurried pace down the cracked sidewalk, reassembling her phone long enough to text Mozzie: BURN SATURDAY.

He doesn’t respond. She didn’t expect him to; she hadn’t sent the code for distress, or requested contact. Mozzie knows how to go to ground.

She can only hope they didn’t make him last night. She has no idea how they followed her here; she’d been careful.

The sun soon chases away all friendly shadows, but brings no warmth to replace them. She can’t see any clouds, but she can smell snow on the way.

A fleet of black cars blocks the lot at her motel, light bars flashing.

She drops behind a low hedge across the street before she registers it’s her door open, her room they’re going in and out of, carrying her things in clear plastic evidence bags. At first there’s only a quiet, frozen calm, a still voice saying _I guess it’s time to go now_.

Then she’s moving before she can consciously think, following the line of bushes to the end of the street, her heart thumping hard in her throat as she makes for the nearest subway entrance.

***

She buys a bus ticket to Chicago under an alias she’s pretty sure the feds cracked two years ago. At a rest stop somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, she drops her cell phone into the open handbag of the woman dozing in the seat beside her. When the driver announces they’re staying long enough for a smoke break, she gets off and doesn’t get back on.

It’s three in the afternoon and she’s had nothing but Mozzie’s coffee for breakfast; she lets herself claim that as the reason she’s still more than a little shaky. There’s a diner on the other side of the onramp, trying for a nostalgic fifties feel with booths of cracked faux leather and a dark jukebox in one corner that doesn’t appear to work. She orders waffles with ice cream and fried apples, sits in the corner facing the back entrance, where she can watch the reflection from the front door in the gleaming chrome trim along the walls.

She sips cautiously at hot coffee, shoving aside the bowl of creamers and setting the cup on the table. Pulling the lemon wedge from her water glass, she squeezes it carefully into the saucer.

She can’t call Mozzie for help.

Mozzie is Neal’s ace in the hole. Neal is vulnerable enough where he is; she won’t risk the feds following her to Mozzie again and blowing his cover. Not when she still can’t figure out how they followed her to Saturday last night. Once she leaves, Mozzie will be the only backup Neal’s got.

Kate can take care of herself for five and a half months.

She spreads out a pocket map of the New York subway system, shifting the menu stand and the salt and pepper shakers and the long-necked glass ketchup bottles out of the way. Studies it for a moment before coming to a decision.

The first thing they need is a way to find each other when Neal’s out.

They should have planned for this.

“Late breakfast?”

Kate smiles at the waitress as waffles appear, along with a tiny pitcher of real maple syrup. Another regular feature in their first breakfast of freedom plans. She can’t think about that now.

She can’t think about him waking up alone next Wednesday, knowing she won’t be coming. Can’t think about promises that never should have been made and all the things she can’t fight, nets broken and dreams unraveled.

She can’t think how five and a half months suddenly seems much longer than it did two days ago.

“Can I get you anything else?”

If Fowler is taking her place apart in broad daylight, it means he’s got a warrant. Most likely he’s also got a warrant for her arrest. And he knows she’s been visiting Neal every Wednesday.

“Could I get some more lemons?”

With everything they’ve both done, everything the feds haven’t yet but might still find, they should have known her visits were a luxury that couldn’t last.

“Sure thing, hon.”

Her go bag holds the laptop, cash and makeup and three changes of clothes, three days worth of Power Bars and a water bottle. It also holds a hairbrush and a collection of hotel shampoos, two more burner phones, her lockpicks and various other tools, including a set of tiny paintbrushes, and the few small, lightweight sentimental objects she’s not willing to leave behind.

She carries fewer of those now than she used to. It’s been a part of learning this life, shedding what she doesn’t need, redefining need until she’s stripped her possessions and herself down to a hard and solid core. 

She pulls out the Bordeaux bottle as the waitress sets down another saucer with three lemon wedges. Opens up the thin case holding her paintbrushes, squeezing more lemon juice into the first saucer with her other hand. That bottle held a dream, once, right after they’d lost everything but each other. It had promised wealth and refinement and security, a place to stop running and savor the pleasures of life with no one chasing them.

The message she weaves into the bottle’s label now promises none of these, only a meeting place.

The tip of the smallest brush is as fine as a lockpick. She dips it into the saucer and starts with the X, going over it and turning it into elegant calligraphy. One hand steadies the neck of the bottle so it won’t roll, and then she brushes in a branching array of lines, sprouting out of the X.

She has learned keep her dreams small, lightweight and easy to carry on the run, and over the past few years she has shed dreams faster than she’s shed keepsakes. _Together. Safe. Free._ She will promise nothing more; she can hope for nothing more than this. She brushes with a light touch, watercolor in invisible ink, not wanting to get the label wet enough to warp it. 

And everyone said her art classes had been a waste of time.

She thinks about Penelope, and the kind of cold steel nerve it takes to wait, in one place and under the constant eyes of your enemies and his, fighting the lonely rearguard action while your resources dwindle and your escape routes close off; she thinks about what happens when the loom comes unstrung and the suitors won’t take no for an answer anymore and he’s not back and waiting is no longer an option.

What she weaves now will have to hold them both together for the next five months.

The waitress refills her coffee cup without asking, asks with a friendly smile if she needs anything else and doesn’t comment on the empty wine bottle, the paintbrushes or the pile of squashed lemon peels bleeding juice into the paper placemat. Kate makes a mental note to leave her a generous tip.

She works quickly; no time for hesitation once she’s started. The lines at the top of the label are fading, drying into invisibility by the time she reaches the bottom.

Place it next to a heat source and they’ll reappear: a map of the New York subway system, with a flourished X over Grand Central Station.

There’s a space behind one of the girders near the terminal entrance where she’d stashed an extra emergency passport, years ago, right next to a payphone. She’d kept the passport there for years, and it hadn’t disappeared; she can leave a note there and trust no one will find it either, unless they’re looking for it.

Next comes the hard part.

***

She leaves the cash and the passports with her note in the pocket of the girder. She’ll get them on her way out. Stops beside the payphone and memorizes the number.

The note, once cracked, is simple: _Here. Friday. Noon._ He’ll get out on a Monday. That should give him time to find the bottle and the map; if not, she’ll keep calling that phone every week until he picks up.

She changes into her “visiting clothes” in the station restroom, applying makeup in the smudged mirror and brushing out her hair. She leaves it loose, drapes a scarf around her neck. This next part will be the hardest, and the most dangerous.

Visiting days for inmates are divided according to last names; M through R have visitors on Wednesday. If she’s lucky, Fowler won’t expect her until then. If she’s really lucky, he thinks she’s skipped town already, and is still tracking her cell phone on its way to Chicago.

Or he could have the prison staked out 24/7, could be waiting for her there right now. She doesn’t know Fowler half as well as Neal knew Burke, by the end of it, but she knows she can’t afford to assume he’s stupid. She could be walking into a trap.

It would give their story a certain symmetry.

That’s a risk she’ll have to take. Sometimes they hold Neal’s letters for weeks, looking for codes. Now that she’s wanted by the FBI, it’s unlikely any letter from her will get through at all. If she disappears without a word, Neal will think (will know) she’s in trouble. 

He’ll try to come after her, and an attempted escape (or a successful one - supermax or not, she wouldn’t put it past him) would add years to his sentence or make them both wanted fugitives for the rest of their lives.

“Your boy don’t get visitors on weekends. You know that.”

She knows which guards find her attractive; you notice things, running cons long enough. She knows who might be bought with money, who she might sway if she flirts the right way, and who she’d actually have to sleep with. This one’s eyes undress her every time she walks in here, and every few weeks he brings her coffee while she waits for them to bring Neal in.

She accepts it maybe half the time. She knows better than to burn an asset she might need one day.

Like today. “I need to see him.” He frowns, and she leans toward him. “Please.”

“Look, miss -”

“Kate,” she says, and wonders: a hand on his arm? No, too much. She looks down and sniffs. “I’m here to break up with him.” Looks up, blinking rapidly; the tears aren’t faked. (The best lies are mostly true, Neal says.) “I have to do this now, or I won’t - I can’t -”

“Kate -” He glances over his shoulder, and she knows she’s got him. “Look, the warden’ll have my ass if -”

“Five minutes. Please.”

“All right. Five minutes.” He looks at his watch. “Hey, if you - my shift’s up in an hour. You want to wait around, I can drive you home.”

She gives him a watery smile; let him read whatever promises he wants to in it. If she’s still here in an hour, she’ll have bigger problems than him to deal with.

He clasps her arm, possessive, tugging her toward the visiting room. 

“Kate.” Neal’s face lights when he sees her, and her heart seizes. He can still read her; his eyes sharpen at her expression, concerned and alert. “What’s wrong?”

She holds his eyes. _Make this convincing for the cameras, okay?_ She suspects he won’t have to act much, any more than she will.

Pressing her hand against the glass, she adds her fingerprints to the smudges on its surface; scars and echoes, painting a portrait of futility. She lets it all bleed through, the grinding frustration of three and a half years; every time she comes to this dingy little room, it feels like she’s never left. 

“I can’t do this anymore.”

The weak winter sun slips through the blinds, goes through the glass like water to touch his face, throwing stripes across his hair, along his arms. They have five minutes, to last five months.

She waits for the light to click on behind his eyes, for him to hear what she’s not saying: _I can’t visit anymore._

_I have to run. I have to hide._

_I’m sorry._

“What - ?” He leans forward, searching her face; his goes suddenly still, but his eyes dart to the cameras at the corners of the room. Then back to her face, very serious, questioning. _Are you saying what I think you’re saying?_ “Kate, it’s only five months. Let’s think about this, all right …”

Oh, God, he thinks she’s asking him to break out.

_Houston, we have a telepathy malfunction._ He’ll do it, too, if she asks him. If she gives the slightest signal _yes_ right now. If she says I can’t deal with this place, I need you with me _now,_ he’ll do it, all the risks and long-term consequences be damned. 

She shakes her head sharply, unambiguous. _No, that wasn’t the message. Try again._

She’s suddenly acutely aware of the cameras covering every angle of this place. Assuming Fowler isn’t coming down the hallway to arrest her right now, he’ll dissect their parting at his leisure, watching the security tape over and over looking for a coded message. 

“I want to break up,” she says. _We have to split up for now._ “I’m leaving, Neal.”

She sees the moment it hits him. His mouth opens, then closes, but any sound he makes doesn’t reach the microphone. His face is still, eyes soft and blank and devastated. It’s not an act, and he’s taking it harder than she expected.

There’s no way to soften this.

_You’re on your own for the next five months._

“ _Why?_ ” One word, wrenched loose like it hurts, and she’d give anything for ten seconds of true privacy, five seconds; long enough to say all the things she has to trust him to remember, the things she can’t say again until he’s out.

“I’m sorry.” She stands up, keeps her face and her voice cold for the cameras.

“What? God, Kate, please -” He stands, reaching for her in a panicked, involuntary motion. The glass blocks his hand; in her dreams that glass ripples like water, and she’s watching him slowly drown. The words are hoarse. “Can we talk about this?”

There’s no time. She lifts her right hand, like she’s about to reach for his; his eyes follow the motion, and she thinks: _Now._

However she does this, it has to be clear enough that Neal can read it after seeing it only once, and subtle enough Fowler won’t understand it after watching it a hundred times. A single word, to point to a future beyond all this. His eyes follow her hand as it drops to her thigh, index finger shifting to spell a single word in Morse code.

_Bottle._ It will have to be enough. But he looks up halfway through; his eyes fasten on her face again, as she taps out the last letter.

He didn’t see it.

She freezes, in a brief moment of _oh shit what do I do now?_ And then it hits her like a sledgehammer to the throat.

He thinks she’s leaving him for real.

The guard is knocking. Something’s wrong; it hasn’t even been five minutes. She can’t repeat the message. Neal wouldn’t see it; he’s not even looking for a hidden message, staring at her face, stunned and pleading.

Oh God Neal you _idiot._

He thinks she’s leaving him and never coming back. For a moment her brain locks up completely and she can’t move, can’t think.

She steps back, fighting the fluttery panicked adrenaline and the sudden drop in the pit of her stomach. In one last effort, she flicks her eyes up, left and right, to the cameras at the corners of the ceiling - _we’re being watched, none of this is real, I can’t say what I’m trying to tell you_ \- but his don’t follow.

Anything clear enough to reach him, to reassure him right now would tip Fowler off. She’s blown her one chance to set up the message drop, and there’s no time and no plan B and Neal is still staring at her like he’s been shot and Fowler could be in the parking lot _right now_ if he’s not already inside the building.

“Kate,” the guard says, and she flips her scarf over her shoulder and it means _damn you how could you think I’d leave like this?_

“Adios, Neal.” Her voice has to be cold, her face too, but she glances back and it means _I love you I’m sorry oh God please be safe._ “It’s been real.”

_Please don’t do anything stupid._

***

Retrieving her bag at the entrance, she bursts out into the sunlight and blinks, momentarily blinded. Three black cars are parked at the other end of the lot. She pulls her scarf up over her hair and makes for the gate with her head down.

He didn’t see it. He didn’t hear it - he didn’t hear _her_.

They should have planned for this. But Neal doesn’t do plans, he’s always said. He says they make you complacent, unable to improvise; not being able to improvise in the heat of the moment gets you arrested or shot.

Making backup plans on the fly undercover, you have to trust that your partner will be ready to read and react to the two and three layers of meaning you have to braid into any attempt at communication. It never occurred to her he’d think she’s really leaving him. 

It should have; it’s not like she hasn’t left before.

The wind pulls at her skirt, pushes dead leaves and a discarded candy wrapper across the cracked asphalt. Scanning the parking lot for feds, she can’t afford to replay the whole conversation in her head, every look, every gesture, every word she might have used differently. 

He thinks this was goodbye.

The bottle and the map and the note and the payphone are all in place, and all useless if he doesn’t know to look for them. 

She takes a deep breath, forces herself to a brisk but steady pace as the gate nears. 

He’s Neal. Message drop or no message drop, he’ll find her. He won’t take goodbye for an answer; he didn’t the last time. Five and a half months and he’ll be out, and he’ll come looking for her.

If only he waits that long.

The wind snaps the cable against the flagpole, sings through glittering razor wire. She’s at the gate now; she doesn’t look up, at the towers further down along the outer wall. They’re too far away to see, but she knows they’ve got guards with shotguns up there; it’s too easy to picture Neal running across the yard in the dark, to picture searchlight beams catching him, searchlight beams and then a bullet.

_Please let him wait that long._

She makes it to the bus shelter without being stopped. Sitting on the bench, she tucks her feet up beside her so that from behind, the shelter looks empty. A swirl of leaves starts up from the curb, chased in a circle; from the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees snow.

Someone approaches; an older woman, dressed with careful dignity, a wide-brimmed hat and a faded shawl over her dress. She’s holding out a styrofoam cup.

“You looked like you could use it.”

Kate takes the coffee, gulps quickly; a bitter, burnt taste before her tongue is too scalded to taste anything. “Thanks.”

“You’re usually here Wednesdays.”

There’s a paper taped to the wall that once told the bus schedule, long since bleached blank by the sun. But she knows it will be only a few minutes. Messages scrawled in marker and carved with sharp metal cover the inside of the shelter. Initials framed in hearts, curses scarred into the walls. 

“I got two boys in there. I see the older one on Wednesdays.” And Kate remembers her; she’s sat beside her, waiting for Neal. They’ve never talked. “You’ve been coming here a while.”

“Not anymore.”

“I guessed.” The bus is approaching, a barely felt rumble from the other end of the street; in Kate’s head a tiny little voice is chanting run, over and over. “I ain’t here to judge, girl. Not just them doing time, in there. It’s us, too.”

Kate stands, looking back at the walls, the guard towers, the heavy scrolls of razor wire, and realizes abruptly she’ll never have to pass under those walls again. 

It’s the relief she’s unprepared for, sudden and overwhelming, a weight lifted with no warning so she staggers, feeling she might float away with no anchor. Half a second later she thinks the guilt might choke her.

“Name’s Alice,” the woman says, as the bus pulls up. She’s holding out a folded slip of paper; Kate takes it, uncomprehending. “Nobody knows how hard this is, unless they been here. Not my place to tell you when enough’s enough. But if you ever want to talk -”

It’s a phone number. Kate blinks, the numbers blurring into unreadability. Tries to speak and finds she can’t. Alice hesitates, then pulls her into a brief, fierce hug.

“I’ll pray for you,” she says.

“Pray for him,” Kate says. Not that she expects it will help; Kate stopped believing in miracles when her mother left, and she hasn’t believed in any higher force for justice since Adler pulled everything out from under her and got away clean. 

***

She buys a floppy hat from a vendor outside Grand Central Station, retrieves her cash and passports. She leaves the note, wondering if he’ll ever see it, and takes the subway to the Port Authority terminal. Sitting at a bench along the wall, she opens the laptop, buys four bus tickets under four older aliases to four different cities. Then she closes the laptop, pays cash for a ticket at the automated NJ Transit kiosk and gets on the train.

She leans her head against the window as the train sways past Newark and Camden and Elizabeth, grey steel and industrial smoke. She needs to think, but all she can see is Neal’s face in the courtroom, almost four years ago now. She remembers watching him, cocky and grinning in a silk suit; she remembers how his face changed when he saw her. 

He hadn’t expected her to show. She’d blown him a kiss across the room, watched his face crumple for half a second; his eyes followed her as she found a seat toward the front.

She remembers Peter Burke catching the shift in Neal’s face, turning to follow his eyes; she remembers smoothing her face blank when Burke saw her.

They should have planned for this.

Neal tried not to show her he was afraid, but after almost a year apart she could still read him too well. They should have made plans, but facing the reality of his sentence for the first time they’d both been unable to consider those plans might be needed. They’d had little enough time to talk in semi-privacy, before they took him away, and those moments were saved for finishing the reunion Burke had interrupted. For _I still love you_ , for _I’m sorry_ , for _I’ll wait for you_ , _I’m not going anywhere_.

She couldn’t talk about leaving, then. Every time she thought of it, of all the reasons she might have to run, she heard his words to Burke in her mind: _thank you I never would have found her without you_.

She couldn’t talk about leaving, when he needed so desperately to hear her promise she would stay.

Now they’re both paying the price.

_Please_ , she thinks, as the wheels beat a steady rhythm, rocking along the track. _Please please please don’t do anything stupid._


	2. Chapter 2

This wouldn’t be happening if she’d gone to Copenhagen.

She lays low at a safe house just outside Philly for the first two weeks. It’s an old one, one she hasn’t used since Neal went to Europe; she’d never used it while she and Neal were together, never used it while Neal was even in the country. She leaves when she can’t take being still any longer.

She wonders if she got this, too, from her mother, this itch under her skin, this nameless fear at too long a stillness.

She spends three nights in Atlantic City, ghosting across the busy casino floors at 3 AM picking pockets; hustling pool would attract too much attention, and Neal was always better at it than she was, anyway. The artist in her wants to walk along the quiet boardwalk as the sun rises, sketch the snow fences listing across the dunes, the grey winter waves retreating down the beach trailing lace and seaweed. 

Instead she gets on a bus headed south and stows away on the Cape May-Lewes ferry.

In Baltimore one of her credit cards gets declined; she takes a risk and hitchhikes back north, doesn’t wait around to see if red flags will be raised. 

This wouldn’t be happening if she’d gone to Chicago.

It’s about a month and a half since she saw him last when she passes by New York again, stopping just long enough to sign a six-month lease on an apartment outside the city.

She uses an alias Neal will recognize and she hopes the feds won’t. Just in case, she buys a bottle of cheap Merlot at the liquor store on the corner, leaves it on the floor of the bedroom; a decoy that might fool Fowler, if he saw her message. If Neal sees it, he might know to look for the Bordeaux bottle under a floorboard in the closet.

(He might not. Or he might think she left the Bordeaux bottle as a final farewell, a casting off of the last of their shared history. Her gut twists into a hard knot at the thought.)

She steps off the bus in Chicago two days later, thinking _this could have been my life._

Or not. She wouldn’t be stepping off a bus in a freezing wet night, kicking dirty snow off the loading platform and pushing her way toward the terminal doors, squeezing past passengers loaded down with plastic shopping bags, drivers huddled near the door smoking and stamping their feet for warmth. 

Inside there’s a Christmas tree shoved into a corner between a vending machine and a video game console; a gold tinsel garland, draped along the wall over the ticket window, tries vainly to brighten the waiting area. Exhausted travelers form sprawling lines across the terminal, sitting on suitcases or leaning on wet umbrellas; over the intercom, a voice breaks through the bright tinkling holiday music, _passengers holding reboard pass number 235 line up at door number 2._

No, she thinks; she’d have flown into O’Hare, walked down a heated jetway, complaining about the bit of cold air sneaking through the hood around the aircraft door, maybe grabbed a latte at the airport Starbucks before she hailed a taxi; the driver would have taken one of her suitcases. (She’d have had suitcases. More than one.) Or Michael might have sent a limo for her. She can see it, a driver in a dark wool peacoat holding up a boldly lettered sign with her real name on it, broadcasting it for the entire baggage claim area to see.

The thought makes her twitch.

Michael had even sent her a plane ticket.

***

He’d called, maybe two weeks after Adler disappeared and her bank account was emptied and the ceiling of her world caved in. Left a voicemail; she hadn’t picked up, expecting Nick-who-wasn’t-really-Nick or the FBI again.

It might not have been a bad idea, moving across the country somewhere where Adler’s name hadn’t been in the news for a solid two weeks. She’d put out a blizzard of resumes that first week, hand-delivering those she couldn’t email and counting the quarters left in her purse for the public library copier, and been met with a resounding silence. None of her former coworkers or professional contacts were speaking to her; they all assumed she’d been in on the scam. The ones who didn’t suggested, not so subtly, that her inability to see this coming was an indication of incompetence.

She might have even gone for it, if Michael had asked her first.

Instead, a week after she called him back and told him she and Nick had split up and all her savings were gone and she’d had no luck finding a job, he emailed her a one-way ticket to Chicago. He attached a note saying he had a friend who needed a secretary, and he was sorry it wasn’t what she used to have, and it would probably be boring but it was the best he could do, and she wasn’t to think she owed him anything for this, but she was welcome to crash at his place until she got back on her feet. Or as long as she wanted to.

He meant well. And it was sweet, and it was generous, and it was so much more than she deserved from him and it was so much like her father she wanted to scream.

She’d failed, once again, to make her own life work. And here was someone else stepping in to rescue her, to fix everything and set her up somewhere else.

She spent most of the first two days being interrogated by the FBI, learning in the process just how little she’d really known about any of Adler’s business dealings. The rest of that week was sorting through her files at home and putting her place back together after they’d searched it, putting the couch cushions back in place and the paintings back on the walls, and maybe an hour sitting on the floor in the middle of everything that had been thrown out of her filing cabinet telling herself, over and over, that she would not let the bastards make her cry.

She’d managed to avoid the press, at least.

She had a total of five more visits from the feds, over the next two weeks, along with a dozen phone calls asking for clarification of details. After the third visit and the fourth phone call she figured out they weren’t, actually, incapable of writing it down when she told them the first time but rather checking to see if she’d give a different answer, if she’d forget her story, if they could catch her in a lie.

 _We’ll get it all back_ , Nick had said. Neal. Nick did not exist. Had never existed. She had loved him, and he’d never existed.

She spent the rest of the time on the public library computers (they’d confiscated her laptop) going through job search websites. And once, on the fifteen minute express terminal (the one you didn’t need ID or a library card to sign in on), she did a Google search on “Neal Caffrey”.

She hadn’t mentioned his real name to the FBI; she only said they’d broken up and she had no idea where he was. She couldn’t say if it was because she still wanted to protect him, or because she was being treated like a criminal by the people who were supposed to protect people like her from people like Adler and she’d be damned if she’d make their lives any easier after they’d worked so hard to turn what was left of hers completely inside out.

Or maybe after they’d given her the third degree for working for Adler, she figured if they found out she’d been dating a wanted art thief and bond forger she’d really be screwed.

Of all the people who had betrayed her, he was the only one who hadn’t completely disappeared.

He hadn’t come home since the day everything fell apart. She’d told him to get lost. It had been one shock too many, on top of everything else, when he’d told her he wasn’t Nick Halden at all. That he’d been trying to con Adler, even as Adler conned them. She’d stared at him, thoughts moving thickly as she groped for words: _get away from me._

But a day later he sent her a burner phone in a bouquet of flowers; for some reason she didn’t throw it out immediately. She didn’t pick up when he called, but she couldn’t help listening to the voicemails. He called at least once a day. _Hey, it’s … it’s me._ And who was that? she wondered, each time. _Look, I know - I know you’re pissed. I would be, too._

By the time Michael sent her the ticket she’d started applying for waitressing jobs. But there she was both suspicious _and_ overqualified and no one was offering to hire her and rent was coming due and she’d about spent all the cash she’d had in her purse the day her bank accounts were emptied.

_Please, can we just talk?_

She was acutely aware, this time, of having no safety net left. She thought about her great-grandmother’s stories of the Depression, how the only ones who survived were the ones who had cash stuffed under a mattress. Maybe she’d try that, next time.

She wondered, briefly, if all the safety nets had always been lies.

She could hear Nick, again, see him focused on her face like it held the answers to all his most desperate questions. _All this - it feels like I could blink and it would all be gone._

Was that what it had felt like, living a lie that might be revealed at any time? That, she thought, may have been a rare moment of honesty.

She’d blinked and Adler was gone. And she thought that if she went to Chicago she’d understand that feeling, rebuilding her life on foundations she knew to be sand. She’d always know it could all be taken away in less than a heartbeat. Even after her initial anger at Michael faded to a dull throb of background rage, she was left with a crawling fear of depending on such a rescue again. All her past rescuers had a habit of disappearing without warning. 

She wondered if she’d never feel safe again.

She wondered if that was a bad thing.

She sent Michael a politely worded refusal; then she took her sketchpad and a box of pencils and walked down to the park. Maybe she could try the starving artist thing again.

She folded a piece of paper into a tent, a sign with: Portraits, $10. Sat on a bench, thinking she was probably supposed to have a permit for selling things in the park. _Thus begins my life of crime._

The air was humid and close under an overcast sky, and the Italian ice stand on the other side of the walkway did a brisker business than she did. Six hours and three highly satisfied customers later, she’d learned that a) she could still draw and b) it would never pay the rent. The first was more satisfying than it probably should have been, under the circumstances.

It was on a Wednesday, four weeks after Adler left and two days after she drank the last of the coffee left in her kitchen, when Michael wrote again to say the offer was still open. She’d just sold the last of the furniture her father had bought when he moved her out of that crappy studio; it had taken her and the buyer, a young naïve college freshman painfully like a younger version of herself, nearly half an hour to wrestle the armchair down the stairs and onto the back of a pickup. (She’d wondered how much it would cost to move her furniture, when Michael first made the offer two weeks before; that was one problem solved, she thought, staring at her empty bedroom, the pale rectangles on the wall where paintings used to hang and the sleeping bag rolled up in one corner.)

That night she packed two suitcases and four boxes. She’d buy new furniture when she got to Chicago. Once she was working again. Or maybe not; she’d just have to sell it again or leave it behind next time. (But without a mattress where would she hide her cash?)

Neal still called her every day. _At least let me try to explain._

She missed Nick Halden; in some ways his lies had cut the worst. More than that, she wished that she wasn’t alone in this mess, that they could work through this together. She missed Nick, but she had no idea who this man was who kept leaving her voicemails. 

Lying in bed listening to his latest message, staring up at the dusty ceiling fan before turning out the light, she thought that in all of his frantic voicemails Nick had never offered her money. He’d never offered help of any kind, or even suggested they get back together. He only apologized, in great detail, told her he loved her and pleaded for a chance to talk to her.

She could almost imagine there was one person in the world who needed _her_ , more than she needed him. 

The next morning she took her sketchpad down to the park, more for something to do than anything else. She sat on that bench for nearly two hours before someone dropped a ten in her pencil case.

She looked up and there he was.

“Neal.” She said his name deliberately, wondering if this was the real one.

“Kate.” He said hers like a prayer.

“I don’t want your charity.”

“It’s not.” He sat on the other end of the bench, slowly, like he was afraid to scare her. He picked up one of her pencils, twisted it slowly in the sharpener and blew the dust off the point. Then he reversed it before holding it out to her, offering a weapon hilt-first. “I want to know what you see when you look at me.”

The breeze stirring past her face was unexpectedly cold, shifting away the still, humid air like a current forced up from deeper waters; the sky was growing heavy, threatening blue steel rain. 

_We’ll get it all back_ , he had said. By lying and stealing? 

Some fierce, wounded part of her leapt at the thought, said _why shouldn’t I?_

Maybe she shouldn’t be angry at him. Maybe the only way to avoid being conned was to learn how to con better than anyone else. She took the pencil.

She’d drawn him before; they’d drawn each other, sprawled face to face on the carpet in front of the couch. It was practically foreplay; there had always been something erotic about that degree of focus, of concentration on the contours of each other’s faces, the details of each other’s skin.

After a long silence, broken only by the scratch of pencil on paper and the growl of approaching thunder, he asked, “How are - things?”

She stopped squeezing the pencil before she snapped it. “Oh, you know. Boss skipped town with all my money. FBI tore my place apart thinking I was involved. Oh, and my boyfriend turns out to be an extremely talented bond forger and art thief who’s wanted in at least three different countries.”

“Sounds like a hell of a month.” Half his mouth attempted a smile, uncertain and twisted with regret. “Thanks for that, by the way. Not telling the feds about me.”

“Could have been worse.” At his raised eyebrows: “Well, he could have been some second-rate bond forger with no talent at all. That would have been embarrassing.”

“Yeah, well.” A real smile this time, tentative, flickering and then gone. “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

“What about you?” she asked. “You find another job yet?”

“Working on a couple things.” The park was slowly emptying, wiser people recognizing the signs of the approaching storm. “Screwed the last job up pretty bad.”

“By falling in love with the mark?”

“You weren’t the mark.” The words were hoarse, urgent; for the first time he leaned in toward her, and his hair fell forward over the ear she’d been trying to outline.

“Don’t _move,_ ” she said, reaching out without thinking to push his hair back into place; he froze at her touch, and she let her hand fall slowly. “Seriously. I can’t draw you if you won’t sit still.”

“Kate.” His eyes were dark, focused on her with an intensity that felt like falling without a net. “You - us - it wasn’t part of the job.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not. My partner was pretty pissed about - all this. Said you were a distraction. You can ask him.”

So he had a partner? In spite of herself, she was curious. But she made herself concentrate on roughing in the outline of his face, smoothing the paper down when the wind caught at the corners.

“I’m a distraction?”

“You’re very distracting.” It felt like their familiar banter and _God,_ she missed it, with an ache she’d barely acknowledged. 

And she’d forgotten how he could do that, look at her like she was all he could see.

“I have a job offer in Chicago,” she said, after another long pause, once she’d finished his eyes and the weight of the silence was too much. “From a friend of Michael’s.” And she should go; it was the responsible thing to do. A job was waiting for her there, and it was something she could depend on, as much as she could ever depend on anything. Her art wasn’t enough to pay the bills, and it was stupid to turn down a rescue when you were drowning.

It didn’t feel responsible. It felt like pulling the covers back over her head, like choosing the illusion of safety, of protection, over learning to live in a world where the monsters were real.

Neal watched her hands, with a soft, defeated look, as if he didn’t want to miss one second of her continued presence. She looked at the pitiful forty dollars in her pencil case, thought of her two suitcases and four boxes; he was a professional con, and he could probably fake this kind of hopeless adoration. But she couldn’t imagine what she still had that he might want, that would make it worth the effort.

She said, “Tell me something that’s true.” 

By now the park was nearly deserted; early afternoon and the sky was already dark. Thunder whispered again, closer, intimate.

“I miss you.”

“No, really.”

“I’m serious. My partner says he can’t work with me moping at him like this.”

She asked, knowing it was a bad idea, “What’s he working on?”

“He’s - well, you told me not to lie to you.” Half a grin that she couldn’t resist answering, and a helpless little shrug.

“If you told me you’d have to kill me?”

“Oh, please. I’m an art thief, not a super spy.”

And she couldn’t help but laugh at that, and he laughed with her, and she thought con men were supposed to be slick and suave and smooth and sophisticated. And okay, she’d seen Nick (Neal, dammit) do suave, with Adler’s clients, with prospective investors. But never with her. With her he was like a goofy, floppy-haired golden retriever puppy tripping over himself in excitement at her attention. He was as utterly irresistible as any golden retriever puppy, but she’d hardly call him suave.

“What if I wanted to work on it with you?”

She tossed it out, careless, the next volley in a brief flirtation, just to see how he’d respond.

His face went absolutely still, lit from behind by a sudden wild hope that nearly stopped her heart, like bruised yellow light flooding through stormclouds. Replaced in half a second by a terrible uncertainty, wondering if she’d meant it the way he heard it; but he didn’t ask, didn’t speak, didn’t move. For a long moment she didn’t think he was breathing.

She laid her hand over his where it rested on the bench; his fingers curled over hers, clasping tight, as they both leaned in until their foreheads touched. She’d rationalize it later in any of a hundred ways, but she knew then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that she wasn’t going to Chicago.

The rain opened up like an artillery burst, bending the grass and spattering the walkway, soaking their unguarded shoulders; heavy drops fell on her sketchpad, warping his image like a face seen through rippled glass.

***

She gets as far as Des Moines before she finds out. It’s hardly even a surprise.

She’s sitting on the warped linoleum floor of a 24-hour laundromat, watching the dryer toss her clothes and wondering if the young woman who left hers drying and went across the street for gas is about her size. She unplugged the last washer at the end of the row to charge her laptop, and she’s managed to get a spotty wifi signal from the Starbucks next door. 

Four more years.

It’s three AM, and when the last dryer stops the only sound is the scratchy buzz of the single fluorescent bulb flickering overhead. When she clicks on the headline the connection drops; she beats a fist against the washer beside her, biting back curses as she stabs at the mouse.

The article is sparse on details, after she’s reloaded the page four times. It was Burke again; they’d caught Neal at an apartment in Queens. She’d left the bottle there; she wonders if he found it. She wonders what message he read in it, if he thought to look for one (if he had time to look for one).

That he could break out of a maximum security prison with less than two months to plan and no backup is no surprise to anyone who knows him. That he _would,_ with barely three months to go by the time he walked out the front door, is no surprise either.

She knows him. She knows how brilliant he is, how brilliant and how blindingly stupid.

The lot outside is black ice, a frozen stillness that the streetlamps by the sidewalk, sprouting from three-foot-high piles of dirty snow, can’t begin to penetrate.

She wants to call Mozzie.

It’s an insane impulse; she clenches her fist, nails scraping the inside of her palm, and breathes until it passes. She hasn’t caught a glimpse of Fowler in more than two weeks, but she can’t imagine he’s far behind, and if Mozzie’s cover is still intact she won’t risk it now.

Mozzie will blame her, she thinks. She’s not entirely certain he’s wrong. 

Neal knows her as well as she knows him; he wouldn’t risk waiting until her trail was five months cold. He knows how quickly and thoroughly she can disappear. 

She’s done it before. 

Mozzie can’t help her now. Still she wishes desperately she could talk to someone else who comprehends the magnitude of the disaster printed in eight point font in the bottom sidebar of the New York section of the Times. Let him blame her; she’d take it, just to talk to him. For the first time since she left New York she feels completely, utterly alone.

A neon sign blinks from the gas station across the street, promising cigarettes and burnt coffee to all the lost souls out in this bitter Midwestern winter night.

Four more years.

She closes the laptop with a snap, unplugs the cord and slips it in her bag. Her clothes are next; she stops to pull a pair of dryer-warm wool socks over her hands. She could sit here and rage at Neal until sunrise, but she should have expected this. She did expect this.

Neal doesn’t _think_ when he’s in pain.

And she can hurt him - she has hurt him - like no one else.

Glancing out the front windows at the empty parking lot, she opens the dryer next to hers and grabs a heavy black sweater, pulling it on over her head. Her coat, fastened over it, will hold the heat in for a few minutes at least.

Wrapping a scarf around her head and neck, pulling a wool hat down over it, she shoves the door open and plunges into the frozen night. She walks quickly, past shoulder-high piles of snow forced to edge of the street, burying forlorn scraps of post-holiday evergreen and tinsel, alert for ice on the ground and anyone following. She’s no use to Neal, to anyone, if she lets herself get caught.

Half the letters are shorted out on the sign in front of her motel, but it’s enough light to show an unmarked van parked some hundred yards up the block.

No light shows from inside the vehicle. It could be nothing. But she hasn’t stayed ahead of Fowler this long by taking chances. 

Neal would at least leave a note. One of his ridiculous little origami butterflies, or something. And _God,_ she misses him. She remembers the first time the feds got close, Neal and Burke practically teasing each other, and grits her teeth against a wash of fond exasperation and regret.

They’d been so young, then.

She knows how to disappear. Her mind is strangely clear, under the faint stars visible through the city’s glare; she’s on the move, and they haven’t caught her yet. This is what she’s good at, and she thinks with a sour twist of guilt that she is more relaxed now, moving through the night when she wants to be sleeping, than she ever was in New York. 

She keeps walking toward the bus station, arms hugging her chest against the cold.

***

They’d been lying low at a resort upstate the first time the feds got close, with two stolen paintings they couldn’t unload under 24-hour surveillance. Burke didn’t have a warrant, but he knew they were there and he knew the paintings were in their suite, so he’d settled in with a not-at-all-conspicuous giant utility van to wait for their move.

She’d been sleepless and irritable by the third night, pacing just out of sight of the window, while Neal treated the whole thing as a game.

“You realize they’re not going to drink that,” Mozzie said, looking up from his work; he was the only calm one.

Neal hung up the phone, where he’d just instructed a bemused room service to deliver a bottle of very expensive champagne to the utility van. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

She knew this was his way of coping with the strain, as much as snapping at him was hers. That didn’t make it any less annoying, watching him yank Burke’s chain because he could.

“And they’re on duty.” Mozzie shrugged. “It’s your money. Well, technically, it’s not -”

“Details -”

“And when they get off duty they’ll probably ship it off to some evidence lab to see if you left prints on it, or tried to poison them, or something.”

Neal caught her hand, pulled her in toward him until their noses touched; a silent apology for the close quarters, for his nerves, for the feds - for all of this. She could hear the distant pop of fireworks starting outside. 

“It’s the thought that counts,” he said to Mozzie, without looking up. “At least we made the effort.”

***

The countdown clock in her head runs out at a travel plaza on the highway outside Boulder.

She arrives after ten PM, washes her hair in the restroom sink and sits under the electric hand dryer until someone comes in. At the food court she buys a sticky cinnamon roll and stuffs a generous tip in the cup on the counter, tucks herself into a corner booth and props a newspaper open over her face; the clerk at the register pretends not to notice when she closes her eyes, leaning her head against the wall.

She wakes and it’s five minutes till midnight.

He should be getting out today.

Folding the newspaper, she stands abruptly and pulls her gloves on, twists her still-damp hair into a knot. She nods to the clerk before leaving the building, crossing the parking lot to the convenience store by the gas station. Walks past the coffee pot, grabs a beer from the refrigerator case and slips between two truckers who try to grab her ass; one succeeds, and she takes the opportunity to lift his wallet.

She goes outside, making for the edge of the lot where the asphalt runs out into weeds beside the onramp, long grass dead and washed silver-grey under the lights. A line of big rigs purr sleepily, idling beside the diesel pumps, red eyes in the dark. The moon is rising full over the mountains.

He won’t see the moon for another four years.

She twists the cap off the bottle, turning to the east and raising a silent toast: we made it through the first four. (And okay, she’s stretching the definition of “made it” more than a little, but they’re both alive. It’s a start.) She drinks slowly, shivering, walking across the grass into the shadows below the highway and almost running into a utility pole in the dark.

When it’s empty, she flings the bottle at the base of the pole. Flinches at the sound, a pathetic crunch of glass that’s too loud for safety and not loud enough for the hot helpless rage squeezing her lungs. She kicks the pole, twice, hard; then she’s on her knees in the grass, pounding her fists against the splintered wood, biting the insides of her cheeks and trying to breathe, trying to force out the sobs choking her without making a sound.

Sometime much later she stands, slipping through shadows alongside the parked trucks. She climbs into the back of the first one with a simple lock and no hazmat symbols, pulls the door shut and falls asleep within minutes.

Bright sunlight wakes her; bright sunlight and sirens.

She blinks and there’s narrow strip of shoulder with two patrol cars, six lanes of highway on one side and a guardrail on the other, a steep embankment falling away into tangled brush and dead winter trees beyond.

“If you’ll step out of the truck, miss.” And there’s a silver-haired cop with a gun. Lowering a gun, looking slightly apologetic, like he’d expected a threat and hadn’t found one.

“… radioed the Marshals,” she hears another cop saying, and thinks, _Fowler._

They’d have had cameras at the gas station. As she’d have realized, if she’d been thinking clearly. If she’d had more than six hours’ sleep in the last three days. They’d have seen her get in, got her face and the plate number.

Fowler isn’t here yet, at least. And the officer in front of her, holstering his gun and offering her a hand to step down from the trailer, clearly feels sorry for her. She’s not sure what message was passed from Fowler to the Marshals to the Colorado highway patrol; he sees a girl on her own, confused, cold and exhausted, and hardly capable of giving him any trouble.

She doesn’t have to fake the cold and exhausted part. She lets herself stumble a little, climbing down.

“Come on,” he says, pulling her arms behind her back. She flexes her wrists as he locks the cuffs in place; he tightens them half-heartedly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“The hell’s going on?” The driver, she assumes, approaching from the other side of the truck; in a leather jacket and a battered ball cap, he’s the only one not in uniform. She lets him distract the cops while she works a pin free from her coat sleeve, slides it into the lock and waits to feel the familiar click.

In less than twenty seconds her hands are free, and she’s leaping the guardrail and running down the slope, crashing into the brush below.

***

Neal had a buyer lined up with a getaway vehicle on the fifth day. Either that, or he finally got bored with tweaking the feds; he’d bounded into the room after spending all morning in the hotel kitchen, where he’d been flirting with the staff while examining the air ducts.

“We’re getting out. Moonrise, tonight.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You clear that with our friends outside?”

“Oh, they’ll know soon enough.” And he flung open her sketchpad, quick pencil diagramming the kitchen and the grate in the ceiling, the branching path of the ventilation shaft. “I’m going out the front door while they’re changing shifts, Moz goes out the back. You black out all the lights and stay away from the windows, wait for my signal.”

“Make them think we left already.”

He grinned, sharp and bright, nodding at the drawing. “You can get the paintings out through there?”

“I’d like to see them try and stop me.”

She sat in the hallway, watching as the bright squares of light on the floor in front of the windows stretched and slanted, elongating and fading with the sunset. Shielding the light from her phone display in the dark as Neal texted her updates, reminders, playful fragments of poetry. _Got the truck, be there soon. Don’t forget to wrap everything twice._

_I’ll come to thee by moonlight though hell should bar the way._

He’d left a folded paper cat on the windowsill; she saw it just before she closed the door, ears and tail up, alert.

***

Somewhere west of Eugene, she hitches a lift with a lanky, weathered man in a tanker truck. Three hours later, passing by a diner and a fire station in some town she’s never heard of, she abruptly decides she doesn’t want to be in the cab with him anymore.

It’s nothing she can pinpoint, and she doesn’t wait to try. Something in the silence, or the way he looks at her, that didn’t ring alarm bells when she got in. The next time they pull up to a stoplight she unlocks her seatbelt and opens the door in one smooth motion, stepping down into the street with a breezy, “Thanks!”

It’s the absolute worst sort of little town to be dropped in, too small for her to disappear into a crowd but just large enough to have traffic cameras at that intersection. But she hasn’t stayed alive this long by ignoring her instincts.

She can’t afford to be this tired. If she’d had any sleep in the past two nights, she might not have gotten on that truck in the first place. 

She drops off the grid, picks up a pocket map at the railroad museum just past the courthouse and follows the tracks out of town as the sun sets.

Fowler was right behind her when she crossed into Oregon three days ago. She’s running out of cash; worse, she’s running out of clean IDs. She has to stop reacting; she has to get far enough ahead she can stop to breathe, and sleep, and think.

She walks all night, flashlight beam picking out the ties, skittering across snow and gravel, bending around dark shadows of trees. It’s a freight line, running through twenty miles of what looks like nothing but trees, if the map is right. Two days’ walking should get her to North Bend.

She needs space to think clearly and plan her next move. She’s been on the run for nearly six months and she’s worn and exhausted and heartsick and scared and she’s starting to make mistakes she can’t afford.

She needs to get a message to Neal.

She has no idea how, and she can’t risk it now. But soon. It has to be soon, once she’s a little further ahead, once she’s put a little more distance between her and Fowler.

Watching the sun rise, she wishes fiercely for her watercolors. She wants to paint the long curve of the tracks, dark metal and wet wood under white snow and brown pine needles, seashell-pink sky arching over tall pines climbing to shade the tracks like a Gothic archway.

Neal doesn’t handle being still any better than she does, and he won’t sit quietly in prison for four years alone. She has no idea what he might do, now, and she’s afraid to find out.

Escape might be the best option at this point; she doesn’t know what Fowler wants, or how far he’ll go to get it, but if she stays ahead of him long enough he might give up the chase and go after Neal instead. But any future breakout plans have to be coordinated, with a route out of the country in place for both of them ahead of time.

She wonders if she dares try to get in touch with Neal’s attorney. He’d done as well as he could for them; she’d never trust him with escape plans, but he might at least be willing to deliver _I’m sorry I still love you I’m waiting I’m all right I just have to hide for a while._

They’d at least have to let him see Neal.

She feels the rumble of a train before she hears it, slides down the embankment and puts a thick pine trunk between her and the tracks, settling against the bole. Filling her water bottle with snow, she sets it on a rock in a sunbeam, slanting between pine boughs. Leans her head back against rough bark and waits.

She thinks she could disappear here, swallowed up in the stillness of the majestic trees. The silence is relaxing, enveloping, invites awe and contemplation like the ceiling of a Renaissance church.

She closes her eyes.

When she wakes it’s almost noon, and she’s not alone.

“Found anything?”

She blinks, shoving to her feet in a whirl of sleep-fogged panic, but it’s only a young couple in tie-dye scarves and ripped jeans.

“We’re hunting mushrooms,” the woman clarifies, at her stunned look. And then, “Are you lost?”

Kate takes a breath, steadies herself, holds up the folded map with a rueful smile. “I’ve got this.”

“You sure you don’t need a ride somewhere?” the man asks.

“Where are you headed?”

“Delivering produce to farmers’ market stands for the next fifty miles or so,” the woman says. “Then we’re driving all the way to LA. You’re welcome to tag along, if you don’t mind riding on the back with the cabbages.”

From LA it’s two hundred miles to the cache in San Diego. It’s a risk, but she’ll have to take it; she needs cash, or something she can fence quickly, and she needs a clean passport. After that, twenty miles and a straight run to the border.

Two hours later she’s sitting in the bed of a battered pickup, wind tearing at her hair, picking up speed on the way south toward California and the Pacific Coast Highway.

She’ll find him. Somehow. She just needs to clear her head long enough to think. She’ll find him, and they’ll run together, like great hunting cats across the plains, like hawks riding down the wind, glorious in flight. They’ll run and keep running, and together nothing will stop them.

***

“You really shouldn’t bait them like that.”

It had been a long, cobweb-filled crawl through a ventilation duct, but she’d gotten the paintings out just as she said she would. The twenty-yard sprint from the exit to where a stolen delivery truck idled got her heart thumping wildly, but no alarms sounded and she vaulted into the back.

Neal hugged her fiercely with one arm, rapping softly against the wall with the other fist, a signal in iambic pentameter. The pitch of the engine changed as they pulled the doors closed, and the truck started moving.

She laid the paintings carefully inside a crate, turned to see Neal grinning at her. “You’re amazing.”

She laughed, soft and breathless, adrenaline singing in terrified exhilaration and relief. “Nice of you to notice.”

He stepped closer. “You’re beautiful.”

“I have cobwebs in my hair.”

“You’re still beautiful.”

She threaded one hand through his hair, dragged him in for a kiss that lasted a good deal longer than she’d intended; breaking long enough for air, she said, “I mean it. They’re _feds._ It’s not safe.” 

“Admit it.” His hands found her waist, backing her toward the wall; something wild and reckless leapt in his eyes, arcing like a live current between them. “You enjoyed that.”

She kissed him again, just to shut him up, blood still pounding in her ears; he hummed against her mouth as she tugged his shirt up, sliding her hands up his back. The phone buzzed.

“As a reminder, we have a delivery to make.” Mozzie, in the cab, voice too dry to tell if he was amused. “We unload the stolen property _first._ Getaway sex later.”

“Moz. Please. We’re professionals, here.” She could see Neal struggling to keep a straight face in the light from the phone display; catching her eye, he mouthed, “I love you.”

“Later,” she returned silently, through a wide grin.

Mozzie only said, “But of course,” before hanging up with a snort, and they both collapsed on the floor laughing.

***

Her own face is the first thing she sees in San Diego.

She’d taken a risk and caught a Greyhound in LA; she’d even managed maybe two hours’ sleep between rest stops, though it doesn’t seem to have made much difference. Pushing open the door to the terminal building, she catches the bulletin going out over local news on the TV overhead. _If you see this woman, please contact law enforcement at once …_

He’s here.

It’s twenty miles to the border and she’s tempted to start walking, pull a hat over her face and head south out of town without trying to find a ride. The sun is slipping already, throwing long late afternoon shadows along the sidewalk; if she moves now, and quickly, she might make it before sunrise and sneak across in the dark.

First she needs cash. She can find cash and clean passports and millions of dollars worth of stolen art less than three miles from where she stands, but with Fowler this close behind her she can’t risk leading him right to it. Instead she pulls out a pile of cards, scanning the street for an ATM and sorting them into stacks of maybe burned, probably burned and almost definitely burned, trying to think which of the first category has the most money in the account.

She’ll find a payphone in Tijuana and call Neal’s lawyer; she might have more than one use for him before long. She knows better than to assume Fowler won’t follow her across the border, but getting permission from the Mexican government should take some time.

She makes for the first ATM she sees; it’s not until she sees the car door opening across the street in the convex mirror that she realizes she’s on a side street with only one exit, blocked at the far end by two dumpsters and a fence as tall as she is. Two men in plainclothes are approaching from the other end.

And now she sees Fowler behind her, getting out of the car.

She briefly considers trying to run, jumping the fence; it’s high, and no way to tell what’s on the other side. She shuffles the cards in her hands; most are old accounts she used while Neal was in Europe. Except one. Purdue is in the definitely burned pile and linked to a nearly empty bank account, but it’s an alias Mozzie made for her only last year.

Mozzie will know it’s her, if he’s looking. And a hit after all this time, after she’s gone dark for six months on every name he’d know - he’ll recognize this as a distress call.

It’s the only card she has left to play, as the car door slams shut behind her. In the seconds she has left, she shoves it into the slot. She’s not sure what help she expects from Mozzie, or if this is only a flare sent up to mark where she disappeared.

She looks up into the camera as she punches in the PIN, waits for the name to appear on the screen.

Purdue. Perdu.

_Lost._

How appropriate.

A hand grips her shoulder. “Ms. Moreau.”

Her throat is too dry to swallow, her heart is battering like a hummingbird trapped behind her ribcage and a sudden sick drop in her stomach says _you’re not as good as you thought you were,_ says _no help is coming._ Still she checks her warped reflection in that mirror, pauses a beat before turning; she’s worn thin and exhausted, she’s slept in her clothes for a straight week and she hasn’t had a proper shower in nearly as long. But she’ll be damned if she’ll let this man see she’s afraid.

“Agent Fowler.”

“You’ll need to come with us.”


	3. Chapter 3

Twenty minutes later she’s sitting at a tiny round table in a mid-range hotel suite, hands still cuffed behind her back. The two plainclothes are stationed at the door and the nearest window, like they’re expecting her to make a run for it. The shorter one is going through her bag.

Fowler sits across from her, hands folded. She notes with some satisfaction that he looks tired, despite the faint smirk.

She says, “Normally you buy a girl dinner before you bring her back to your hotel room.”

“Where’s Caffrey hiding everything?”

Okay, we’re done with small talk. “I want to know what the charge is against me.” She leans forward. “And I want to talk to a lawyer.”

“Later,” he says. “Perhaps. First you tell me what I want to know.”

Shorter agent has her laptop open, next to a pile of passports on the bed.

“You know damn well that’s not how this works.” But no one has even read her her rights yet. Mozzie’s wildest conspiracy theories are chattering in the back of her mind - did Neal steal something highly classified from the government? Missile launch codes? Dead aliens from Area 51?

That doesn’t sound like Neal. (Although she could see Mozzie being tempted to make a try for the dead aliens.)

Is Fowler working outside the law entirely, looking to get rich seizing stolen art treasures for himself? Neal’s stash, all together, would sell for a significant amount of money.

“I assure you I can hold you indefinitely until I find what I’m looking for,” he says. “I don’t think you quite understand your position, here.”

He’s bluffing. Most likely. Probably.

She thinks.

“Then explain.” Something isn’t right, something beyond the obvious. “Just so we both know where we stand with each other. Have I been arrested or have I been kidnapped?”

“It’s a grey area.” The same smirk, and she thinks _that would be option B, then._

Shorter agent has her phones in front of him, scrolling through her call history.

“Look, you think I enjoy chasing you all the way across the country and back? I’m as eager to see the last of you as you are of me.” Now he sounds weary and exasperated, as if the last six months’ flight was some game she came up with for her own amusement. “Show me where he hid everything. We just want to recover what’s been stolen. Then we go back to DC and you can go back to New York, and we never see each other again.”

“And then what? You’re going to return it all to the rightful owners?” But surely there are easier ways for a man with his position and his willingness to abuse it to get his hands on a few million dollars.

Unless he’s looking for something specific.

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Neal’s got two felony convictions on his record already,” she says. “A third puts him away for twenty-five years. If he did have stolen property hidden somewhere - and if I did know where it is - I wouldn’t show you this hypothetical cache without a guarantee that Neal won’t be prosecuted for anything in it.”

“Fine,” Fowler says. “I’m not looking to nail Caffrey. Where is it?”

“Oh, no.” She shakes her head forcefully. “I want an immunity agreement signed by a judge. I see the papers before you see anything.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t want a judge involved.” 

His voice drops the temperature in the room by several degrees. “For your own safety, I’d advise you not to speculate too far.”

“You don’t want a record of any of this.” 

“Please.” And now he only looks impatient and tired. “I haven’t even read you your rights.” He gestures around the room. “I’m holding you without access to a lawyer. Hell, I’ve got a gun I could threaten you with if that would make you feel better. Nothing you show me under this kind of coercion is going to be admissible in court. You’re smart enough to know that.”

And maybe it’s sleep deprivation combined with wishful thinking, but maybe Fowler really isn’t interested in getting Neal for past crimes. She wants to believe he’s broken enough laws since catching her that nothing he finds will hold up in court anyway. That if he finds what he wants he’ll leave her alone, and she can be back in New York in time for visiting day next Wednesday, she can see Neal and press her hands to his through that glass and tell him she’s sorry and she loves him and she’s always loved him and she never wanted to leave.

She wants to go home.

And she looks away, fighting back utterly inappropriate laughter that’s more exhausted rage than anything else. _What have they done to us, what have we become, that I think of home and see that stuffy little visiting room?_

“I’m supposed to trust that?”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” sounding conversational, now, “but he’s not at Sing Sing anymore. As of two days ago he’s out on work release with a tracking anklet and a two-mile radius. Consulting for Burke, of all things.”

She takes a careful breath, smoothing her face to hide her reaction; the news surely doesn’t warrant this sudden, shuddering flood of relief.

But Neal is _thinking_. Finally. She knows what this means; he’s stopped reacting blindly and he’s setting things in motion for a longer term plan.

She has no idea how he managed to sell Burke on such an idea, Burke who knows exactly what he’s capable of - unless Burke is as weirdly fascinated with Neal as Neal is with him. But with a two-mile radius and access to resources he didn’t have behind bars, he can look for her quietly without alarming the feds until he has a solid plan in place.

Her mind races, questions spinning wildly. Did he find the bottle? Did he find her message? 

But Fowler is still talking. “Caffrey’s an expert forger. If you’re as close to his equal in that department as you are at evading arrest, you know all kinds of things can be faked. Bonds. Paintings. Evidence.” And reality snaps back with a cold chill. “A lot of trouble someone like him could get into, in two miles, in Manhattan. Couple museums, at least a dozen jewelry stores. Something disappears and then turns up in his loft.” He shrugs. “It could happen.”

She needs Neal to think clearly now. She’s too tired to do all the thinking for both of them, anymore; she can’t be sure she’s making the right decision.

But she can’t see any other options left.

“Warehouse by the water. Off Harbor Drive.”

***

He’s driving with one hand and holding his cell with the other when she waves for him to pull over. His voice on the phone is quiet, clipped and professional. “Yes, sir, we have a location. Headed out there now.”

Across the street, beyond the pier, the sinking sun throws glittering copper-gold sparks across the waves. A chorus of angry gulls greets them getting out of the car, high and fierce and lonely; she doesn’t see any people. She points wordlessly up the street.

“Which one?”

“Somewhere on this street. I’ll recognize it,” she says. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“Believe me, the less you know, the safer you’ll be.”

She stops under the first security camera she sees, staring down from a warehouse roof.

“This one?” he asks.

“You said you had a gun.” It’s her word against his that he denied her a lawyer and failed to read her her rights. Being threatened with a gun on camera is proof of coercion, and the only protection she can offer Neal if anyone tries to pin what’s hidden here on him.

Fowler’s eyes flick up to the camera. “Fine.” He pulls the gun from under his coat almost casually, gesturing up the street with the muzzle before training it steadily on her. “Show me where it is or I’ll shoot.”

Sudden doubt tightens her throat; he doesn’t even blink at the cameras. She wonders how much protection this is, or if he’s the kind of person who can make a security tape disappear on a whim. She wonders if he really can make her disappear.

He’s making her think like Mozzie. No point in further dithering; she keeps walking, checking the numbers on each door until they reach the corner. 

“This one.” She turns the lock in her hand. “Unless you’ve got a pick set, I’m going to need my bobby pins back.”

He has a pick, and it’s a good thing; the lock is rusted and reluctant to move. The door squeals, rolling up, complaining in counterpoint to the gulls outside.

Something rustles overhead; three small brown birds swoop toward them and out the door into the sunset. Looking up, she sees two nests perched on a high rafter and above them, a ragged hole in the roof throws a patch of red light on the floor; motes of dust flash, drifting in the slanting beam.

The windows are papered over; a thick layer of dust covers the concrete floor, broken only by tiny birds’ footprints.

There’s nothing here.

For a moment they all stand frozen. Then Fowler whirls on her.

“This is the address he told me,” she says, quickly; it’s the truth, and she doesn’t flinch from his glare, though her mind is racing. _Now what?_

“Maurice, pull the feed from those cameras outside,” he snaps at his shorter agent. “Find out if anyone’s been in here. Allen, start dusting for prints.”

This place hasn’t been touched in years. There was never anything here.

Oh, God, this was a _test._

Fowler stalks over toward the door; the three of them lean in together to inspect the lock. She moves along the wall, staring around at the empty floor. Neal told her this address the first time they had a chance to talk, after they caught him.

They’d been apart more than six months by then; he hadn’t expected her to show at his trial. Hell, he probably wondered if she stayed to try to get her hands on his stash.

And so he gave her a fake address, told her this is where it’s all hidden, waited to see if she’d really stay and visit him or if she’d light out for San Diego. Probably had someone paid to watch the place, for the first few months, to see if anyone came looking.

She remembers his eyes, watching her at the trial; all that time he’d suspected she might betray him, and he’d still looked for her, still latched onto her face as the only source of strength and comfort in that room. She remembers the first visit in prison, his eyes shadowed from constant vigilance and lack of sleep, putting on a brave front for her; she remembers the way he studied her face, searching every expression. She thought he’d been trying to memorize her, to capture an image to hold him until next time; he’d been trying to read her, trying to guess if his only anchor in this place was false and rotten.

Had he wondered if she’d been in on the trap?

She closes her eyes, breathes through the hot tears threatening. She’d been hiding from him for months, and suddenly he found her, and five minutes later Burke showed up; anyone would wonder if she’d been part of it, if Burke hadn’t paid her off somehow.

Oh, God, _Neal._

She swallows back a sob. She wants to see him. She wants to talk to him, to hold him and rage at him, _how could you think_ and _after all we’ve_ and _I’d never_ ; she wants to tell him everything she could never say in plain words while the cameras -

_Wait._

She draws a sharp breath, looks up carefully to see Fowler and the others all still clustered around the door. Maybe Neal thought she betrayed him; maybe he thought she was after his money and his treasure.

Or maybe he anticipated the situation she finds herself in now, or one like it. Maybe he suspected an old enemy might try to force her to reveal his secrets.

He wouldn’t have left her with nothing. There’s something here, either a message pointing to the real cache or something to help her escape whoever might be holding her. Something designed to be read by her and only her.

She can’t afford to be stupid. She can’t afford to freak out and miss whatever hidden message he’s trying to send her; they’re both still living with the fallout of their last miscommunication.

There, in the corner; there’s a grate in the wall by the floor. Watching the door, she sinks into a crouch, leaning back against the wall while her bound hands work at the screws. They’ve been loosened, a long time ago; rust flakes onto her fingers as she pulls them free.

She can’t see, reaching back into the space behind it, but she feels the outline of a bulging envelope. Cash, by the feel of it; cash and four passports. _Neal. I love you._ She exhales slowly. _Thank you thankyouthankyouIloveyousomuch._ She slips it up under the back of her shirt and pulls her coat down. She’s just finishing tightening the screws in place as Fowler returns.

“No one’s been here in years. You think this is some kind of game?”

She pushes to her feet, steadying herself against the wall. “He told me it was all here.”

His cell phone rings. His face, glancing at the display, is a study in tight fury; for a moment she thinks he’s going to hurl it into the wall.

But his voice is calmly controlled as he answers. “Yes, sir.” He beckons sharply at the other two, gestures in her direction, _bring her._ “No, sir, it’s not here.”

***

She half expected Mozzie to mock her for being nervous before her first con. 

She hears his voice in her dreams, now; when she closes her eyes the lines on the highway disappear and she can see again the mess of papers and that old couch, in the first apartment the three of them shared.

They lived in a sort of organized chaos that Neal and Mozzie understood but she didn’t; it wasn’t that she was obsessively concerned about being tidy so much as that she had no idea what in the pile of papers on the floor was incriminating, or what she should grab and try to hide first if the police were at the door. Even then she could guess they weren’t really as careless as they appeared to be, and between them they had backup plans for such situations. But they hadn’t shared them with her, and she was getting tired of feeling like the baby sister in this little crime family.

Or so she’d felt until the past week, when Neal ran a plot by them that absolutely required someone with two X chromosomes and the ability to walk in spike heels.

People like Adler weren’t afraid to steal. People like Adler didn’t have to worry about getting caught.

But all Mozzie said, when she threw aside Neal’s notes on her background in frustration, was, “You’re angry.”

He’d been lying on the couch with a book while she sat on the floor, leaning against the coffee table, but he sat up now; she was tempted to seize the space next to him, between him and his Russian military surplus spy scope or whatever. But for all their increasingly childish slapfights over the couch and the TV remote and Neal’s attention, it wasn’t really him she wanted to hurt.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “Just stressed, that’s all.”

And she shouldn’t have said that, because she was proving him right, showing she wasn’t ready for this.

Mozzie said, “No, you’re pissed at someone. Who? Us? Adler?”

He was far too damned observant, she thought, even after they’d barely been living together for a month.

But she was going to show them all - Neal, Mozzie, her father and the feds and the Adlers of the world - that she could do this, that she could keep up with them. “Son of a bitch took everything I had.”

It wasn’t even the stuff she was angry about losing, so much as the ability to believe in any kind of security. She was afraid, and she was angry that she was afraid. And she really didn’t want to get into this with Mozzie right now.

He had other ideas. “And you’re studying those notes in preparation for what, exactly?”

“This is different.” At his raised eyebrows: “You do not get to judge me for -”

“No.” Mozzie shook his head sharply. “Look. Kate. You don’t steal because you’ve been hurt and you want to hurt someone, or because the world took everything from you and by God people owe you. This isn’t about revenge.”

She flushed, but Mozzie appeared utterly unfazed by her glare. She almost said _what would you know about it?_ , almost said _you couldn’t understand._ But she had just enough presence of mind left to remember that she knew very little about him, and his answer could make her feel very small and petty indeed.

“What’s it about, then?” she asked instead, suddenly weary.

“It’s about seeing something you want and taking it because it’s beautiful. Because you’re smarter than whoever has it, and if they can’t hold onto it they don’t deserve it. Because the alternative is life in a nine-to-five box where you’re a number tracked by the system everywhere you go.” He shrugged. “If you’re Neal you do it because the security is supposed to be unbeatable, and while I don’t recommend that as a reason it’s better than some of yours. You don’t steal because you’re pissed and you want someone to pay. You’re not the arm of justice.”

She gritted her teeth and picked up Neal’s notes again. He was saying, essentially, _get over yourself already, not everything is about you._ He was also speaking to her, rather than around her or over her head at Neal, for the first time since she’d moved in.

And he was shifting that giant range-finder telescope tube thing or whatever it was onto the floor, making room for both of them on the couch.

She wouldn’t realize until much later, after that job and many others were finished, that Mozzie knew perfectly well she’d been terrified more than anything else; he knew, and he’d had the respect and consideration for her pride to pretend not to notice.

***

She can’t afford to be afraid now.

“He hid a lot of stuff in a lot of places, over the years,” she says, eventually, once they’re back at the hotel, “I’d check Seattle first, then maybe Denver. Or Flagstaff.”

Fowler paces the room for maybe ten minutes, while his minions stand and glare at her until he growls, “Fine.”

After that she gets a real shower; getting dressed again, she counts about $10,000 in the envelope and confirms that all the passports have her picture and names she’s never used. She tucks them all into a more secure hiding place in an inside pocket of her coat.

Then she shifts someone’s overnight bag off the nearest bed, crawls under the blankets and goes to sleep.

They don’t bother to cuff her in the morning; she sits in the front with the map (“you’re the one who knows where we’re going, you can navigate”) while the three agents rotate in and out of the driver’s seat.

It’s not in Seattle. It’s not in Denver, or Flagstaff, either. They keep moving, and Kate tries to remember all Neal’s old caches and relearns what it is to wake in the morning and sleep in a bed at night. They stay in the closest motel they find when it gets dark; some nights she has her own room (those nights the agents take shifts outside her door) and some nights she doesn’t, but she gets her own bed, which is an unbelievable luxury still, and no one tries anything so that’s something and she’s long past feeling awkward about close quarters. Besides, it’s an opportunity to observe them.

She sleeps in the car when she’s not reading the map, and learns to cover the fear when she startles awake at every stop. She hears Mozzie’s voice in her dreams, still, but she’s too tired now to be angry.

Once the initial exhaustion has faded, she finds she can’t sleep in the dark. Resting at night keeps her awake, skin crawling with the urgency to move, screaming that she’s wasting precious time when she could travel unseen.

She wonders if it’s a similar adjustment for Neal, out on work release in Manhattan, free and yet not, safe and yet not; does he wake every night seeing opportunity for flight calling? Does he sit up in bed, paralyzed, every instinct saying _run while you can_ while his mind repeats, over and over, all the reasons he can’t right now?

She can’t run yet. She needs a plan.

She needs information.

And so she sits on the bed and cracks the window and listens to the cars rushing past, the ever-present hum of the highway over the rattle of the radiator. She imagines climbing through the window and running across the parking lot, hotwiring the car and heading down the highway with the windows open, cold wind slapping her face and clawing icy fingers through her hair.

She vows silently she’ll chew her foot off before she lets them keep a GPS tracker on her.

Fowler is working for someone. Someone he calls “sir” and isn’t happy to hear from, though his face and voice on the phone are studiously blank and carefully professional. Does he owe someone money?

“What’s your cut?” she’d asked one morning, when the silence in the car got to be too loud and she’d asked herself one too many times _what would Neal do?_

The answer was the same: “The less you know, the safer you’ll be.”

She is stalling, again, weaving a web of crisscrossing lines across the map; she’s not sure for what, as February bleeds into March somewhere south of Kansas City. The lines on the highway blur and the names on the green signs change as the grass turns from brown to pale green and the scruffy weeds along the shoulders burst into unruly wildflowers. She thinks about the next cache, the next trip, trying to space them out as far as possible.

She doesn’t know where it is.

Unless he’s looking for something Neal left behind in an old cache as not particularly valuable, they won’t find it anywhere they’re checking. She has no idea where to find whatever Fowler is looking for. But she doesn’t want to show her hand just yet; this is the only leverage she has.

She thinks about Penelope, who understood fidelity and loneliness, patience and the art of the long con. She wonders how much he wants to keep this quiet, how much stalling he’ll tolerate before he goes after Neal directly. 

She needs to talk to Neal, needs to find out if he knows what Fowler wants, and what the consequences would be of giving it to him.

She wonders if Neal found her message, if he waits for her at Grand Central at noon on Fridays.

She needs a phone.

She lifts Fowler’s wallet outside Reno, when he gets out of the car to make a phone call. Covers it and her hands with the map, as she opens it. Five credit cards and four driver’s licenses under four different names; the license that matches the name on his badge is from Washington, DC. And tucked out of sight in the back, in a separate card pocket - not one of the clear photo sleeves - is a picture of an attractive dark-haired woman in her late thirties.

Not a mistress (pity, that might be something she could use), or there would be a picture of a wife more prominently displayed. She guesses they’re no longer together - old girlfriend? Messy divorce? Whoever she is, he wants to keep her picture on him but he doesn’t want to see it every time he pulls out his credit card.

She memorizes all the aliases, puts everything carefully back where it was and slips it back into his coat when he’s distracted.

***

Once that first con was over and no one had been arrested, but before Kate had stopped looking over her shoulder for the cops everywhere they went, Neal decided they hadn’t been on a proper date since she moved in.

Nick Halden would have picked her up and brought flowers, but she had stopped thinking of him as Nick by that time. Mostly. Neal texted her one Friday night with an address, saying _wear the most formal dress you’ve got._

He met her outside the front entrance of the Ritz-Carlton. 

“Can you fake a German accent?” he asked, and she nodded, confused.

Minutes later they were at the check-in desk, past a blur of chandeliers and blue and gold stuffed armchairs, Neal giving a credit card and a name she’d never heard to the valet.

“Her Grace Brunhilde, Countess von Orttenburg,” he said next and she blinked, confused. When she realized he meant her she choked on a laugh, managed to turn it into a cough, covering her face with her arm. 

“As you can see Her Grace is feeling a bit - under the weather,” Neal continued smoothly. Kate gripped his arm, leaning into him, muffling undignified and unladylike snorts against his shoulder. “The journey has been long, and she is not accustomed to air travel. A brief rest will do wonders, I am sure -”

“Of course, sir.” The valet still looked uncertain.

“Sadly, the airline has misplaced Milady’s luggage,” Neal said, explaining their lack of suitcases with an air of grand tragedy. “But if you would show us up to the room -”

“With pleasure,” the valet said, as Kate straightened, having finally brought herself under control.

Standing in the middle of a sitting room that was bigger than their apartment, she said, “How did you - ?” He held up the credit card. “You stole some guy’s hotel reservation?” Her eyes darted, fearful, toward the door. “What happens when he shows up -”

“He won’t. It’s okay.” Neal’s hands held her arms, squeezing gently. “I called and told him the hotel had accidentally booked it twice, and had to cancel.”

“And he just accepted that?” Anyone who could afford this kind of luxury had to be too important to take such a last-minute cancellation calmly.

“I promised him two weeks free next month.”

“And what happens when -” Her voice rose.

“We’ll be long gone by then.” But it wasn’t his usual cocky, showoff, pleased-with-himself con grin he gave her, leaning close to rest his forehead against hers; his smile was gentle, a little uncertain. “Kate. Hey, shhh, I’ve got this. We’re okay.”

She thinks, now, that Neal understood far more of her anger and her fear, those first few weeks, than she ever gave him credit for.

“In that case,” and she tried on a brave smile, “what about room service? I’m hungry.”

She thinks she understands, too, what else he was trying to tell her; that happiness is something you steal, it’s nothing people like them can earn, nothing the world will ever tell them they deserve.

She woke the next morning in a giant four-poster bed with curtains - curtains - drawn up about them, to find him watching her.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, when he saw she was awake.

She blinked as he leaned in; their noses nearly touched, and something vulnerable wavered behind that smile. She’d better, she thought; she was probably an accomplice in credit card theft and, what, impersonating the nobility? In addition to last week’s job. “I trust you.”

“Close your eyes.”

He took her hand as she stood, guiding her away from the bed; she stepped carefully, feet sinking into plush carpet on the third step. She let him lead her around the table; some few steps more and she heard the rattle of Venetian blinds pulled back. He let go of her hand, moved to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. “Okay, now you can look.”

They stood in front of the window, on the thirtieth floor, looking out at sunrise over the city. She breathed on the frost patterns on the glass, glittering sharp silver fogging into mist, melting beneath liquid amber light splashing off the rooftops, reflecting from a thousand windows and the river, catching fire at the crest of a bridge beyond the pier.

She turned her head and caught the look on his face, eyes fixed on her despite the view, wide open and concerned and a little overwhelmed. “We’re gonna be okay,” he said, holding her eyes. “You believe that, right?”

And for one shining, stolen moment at the top of the world she believed they would be; they could take what they wanted and move on together, cutting a swath through this world that cared nothing for them, bright and sharp as matched steel blades in a world of soft, glittering gold.

***

After the sixth stop, Fowler slams a map down on the table at a rest stop food court and says, “I want a complete list, so we can hit the ones close by together, and stop burning time and gas and my patience.”

“The list is on my laptop.” She takes a careful sip of badly scorched coffee. “The one you sent to be dismembered in some lab in DC.”

“The lab didn’t find anything.”

“They wouldn’t have.”

He gives her a skeptical look, but the laptop is delivered to the door of their room by a courier the next morning - with the ethernet card and the modem removed. Mozzie’s DVD is still in the drive.

He has a password key to access his laptop, with a password that changes periodically; she lifts it off him that afternoon, waits until they’re all holding some conference outside they don’t want her overhearing and gets on the internal FBI server. She pulls personnel files for Fowler and the two minions, and on impulse pulls Burke’s as well, copying them to a flash drive. Then she copies her FBI file and Neal’s, and does a search for any case files linked to Fowler’s name, one eye pinned on the door.

Before she closes the laptop she looks up Neal’s current address; according to Google Maps he’s living 1.5 miles from Grand Central Station.

She really needs to get a phone.

The lab didn’t find anything because there was nothing to find; still, she makes up a list with the fifteen old caches she can think of and five random cities she picks for the hell of it. They’re in a suite tonight; Allen and Maurice are in the sitting room fighting over the couch and the last of the spring rolls. She’s sitting on one of two twin beds on a cheerful red flowered quilt, sorting through the mess the lab has made of her files; Fowler sits in a chair near the bedroom door, alternately reading something in a manila folder and watching her.

This won’t do. She opens up the DVD and hits play; at his dubious look, she says, “It helps me concentrate.”

“Some people might find it distracting,” he says, irritated, shortly after Westley is presumed dead.

“Inconceivable!” she declares, and he rolls his eyes.

“I swear, it’s like you’re twelve.”

“Hello.” She puts on a heavy Spanish accent. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed -”

He slams the folder shut and walks out of the room.

She smiles, minimizes the window and inserts the flash drive.

“I am not left-handed,” she whispers to the empty room.

She learns that Allen has two kids from a brief marriage that ended badly back in ‘03; Maurice has never been married and he has a sister currently serving in Afghanistan. Fowler’s wife was killed in a robbery more than a year and a half ago; his file lists no children and no other family he’s in regular contact with.

He was in the Army seven years, five of those in Special Forces, before joining the Bureau; he spent his first ten years with the FBI working Violent Crimes in DC. There’s a gap of a year’s leave following his wife’s death before he transferred into OPR.

He’s based out of DC, still, though it seems he travels around the country a good deal; he’s currently listed as being on “extended assignment” away from the office, with no other details given. Since he left the Army he’s only been out of the country once; two weeks before his leave ended he spent five days in Norway.

His case files are all from the last nine months, since his transfer; all his cases from Violent Crimes have been sealed. The only case file that mentions his name from before a year ago isn’t an FBI file at all; it’s the report from DC Metro Police on his wife’s murder.

She scrolls quickly through a series of crime scene photos and can’t bring herself to look too closely at any of them; she recognizes the dark-haired woman from the wallet photo, her face still and grey and dark bruises in the shape of someone’s fingers ringing her throat.

The investigation is still open but no longer active; there’s a mug shot of a nondescript-looking man named as chief suspect, with his prints were found at the scene, but he’s never been caught.

***

She still needs a phone.

She wonders if Neal found her message. 

Neal taught her to make codes in the first place; Neal and Mozzie, and it’s Mozzie’s voice she hears now, critical once more: “You realize the point of a code is to communicate a message to your friends while concealing it from your enemies.”

She remembers beaming at them both. “Well, it worked, right?” This, after even Mozzie was scratching his head at her latest attempt at a coded note.

“Unless you’ve suddenly decided I’m your enemy, no, it didn’t,” Mozzie returned sourly. “Concealment is not the only goal. You need to work on the communication part. The point isn’t to stump us.”

She felt like she was back in her first art class watching her classmates tear apart her latest beloved masterpiece.

“How can I know it’ll fool anyone, if I can’t fool you guys? I can’t exactly walk up to the feds and ask them to please try and crack my code so I know if it works.”

“You _could,_ ” Neal said.

“ _You_ would,” Mozzie said, giving him a dirty look. “You’re a bad influence.” And then, to Kate, “Don’t listen to him. The feds are not our friends, and poking them with sticks is not a fun and educational activity for the whole family. I don’t care what your boyfriend tells you.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Neal said, and Kate put her head down on the table as Mozzie snorted. Neal wrapped his arm around her, pulled her in toward him and buried his nose in her hair. “Who are you gonna believe?”

She said, muffled, “I know better than to answer that,” because Neal might be the love of her life but Mozzie was probably a secret ninja who could kill her with his pinky.

***

It takes her a little less than a month to get her hands on a cell phone; in the end it’s easier than she expected.

It’s late and they’ve just come from checking another empty cache. (This one held a coded note she suspects will translate to something like _nice try_ or _you really should try the pizza place two blocks from here, they’re amazing_ ; she could probably translate it herself, but she’s not going to make their lives easier.) She and Maurice are sitting in the car outside the local police station while Fowler waves his badge around inside asking questions; they already dropped Allen at a motel up the street to get them a room.

There’s a drug store just across the small parking lot; she can see in through the wide front window. It’s the sort of store that ought to carry cheap burner phones. She glances at the door of the police station; no sign of Fowler. Good. This probably wouldn’t work with him in the car. 

But Maurice has never been married.

“Can I run into the store?” she asks, and he snorts.

“I was told you’re to stay here.” He pulls the handcuffs off his belt. “If there’s something you can’t live without, I can cuff you to the door handle while I get it for you.”

He apparently thinks that will be enough for her to give up the idea.

“Fine,” she says. “I need some more hair ties. Oh, and some Motrin and a box of tampons.”

She might as well have asked for a box of live eels. “You want me to go in there and buy tampons?”

“Unless you’ve already got some in your suitcase.” At his disbelieving look: “You really should have planned for this. If you’re going to hold a girl hostage for more than a month - they didn’t cover this in hostage taking 101 back at Quantico?”

He raises a hand to stop her, an involuntary, panicked I-don’t-need-to-hear-this gesture. This is too easy.

The parking lot is quiet. A dull red sunset has bled out of the sky; dove grey twilight deepens as the streetlights flicker on along the street. She tries not to snicker as she pushes the door open, glancing up by reflex at the CCTV monitor overhead and noting the locations of the cameras.

She buys a phone and a bottle of Motrin in the back at the pharmacy counter, making sure her back and only her back stays visible from the car outside; she “forgets” the pills until she’s already paid for the phone, making the cashier ring them up on a separate receipt. At the front she buys tampons, hair ties, and grabs a bar of Hershey’s special dark just because.

“What did you get in the back?” Maurice demands as she opens the car door. Fowler is still nowhere to be seen.

“These,” she says, passing him the paper bag with the pills and the receipt. “For cramps,” she explains brightly. “They’re very helpful when -”

“ _Enough,_ ” and he’s gone bright red again and it’s all she can do to keep a straight face as he tosses the bag in her general direction without looking inside.

Tomorrow is Friday. She tucks the bag under the seat; the phone is already zipped into an inside pocket of her coat, next to her passports. If they get on the road early enough, they should be ready to hit a rest stop for lunch around noon.

***

A month later Fowler abruptly announces they’re going to New York.

They’re in North Carolina; dogwood trees bloom along the highway, explosions of pink and white erupting in a line beneath a series of garish billboards; the car is covered with a dull film of green pollen dust.

She’s called that payphone twice, but Neal hasn’t answered. Mozzie still berates her in her dreams.

It’s a long ride north; she catches Burke’s name a few times, overhearing the agents whispering at rest stops. Burke is up to something, and Fowler wants to know what.

They stop in DC to pick up what she thinks is surveillance equipment; it looks just like Mozzie’s, only about twenty years newer and sleeker and not labeled in Cyrillic. Fowler holds several long cell phone conversations and looks increasingly tense and annoyed.

She wakes up from a nap somewhere just south of Annapolis and Fowler asks her, point blank, “Why’s Burke looking into you?”

She’s awake instantly. Jesus, that’s the last thing she needs. “I don’t know, but if you find out, please tell me.”

About an hour later they pull off the highway and come to a stop at an intersection; he gives her a level look and says, “I’m losing patience, here.”

By the time they hit the New Jersey Turnpike he’s back to looking faintly smug, which is not a good sign. It means he has a plan. Which is unfortunate, because she doesn’t yet, so he’s one step ahead of her.

***

They find a room in Manhattan some four miles from Grand Central. Kate makes a point of getting coffee in the downstairs lounge at least once a day, testing the limits of her leash; Fowler seems happy enough to take this opportunity to make phone calls he doesn’t want her to overhear, and only sends an agent to watch her.

On Friday she waits until Maurice is distracted and escapes into the lobby; it’s a little after ten when she leaves the hotel behind and disappears into the crowd on the street.

She can’t run; she has no idea what Fowler is planning, or how to shield Neal from it, and she can’t try to escape unless there’s a way to take Neal with her. And she doesn’t want to make anyone too suspicious. So she lets Maurice catch sight of her about two blocks up, lets him think she doesn’t notice him following; he’s decided – or been ordered – to find out where she’s going rather than chase her down.

But he, like Fowler, is based out of DC; New York is her home ground.

She loses him for five minutes near Grand Central, just before 11; long enough for her to check the pocket of that girder and find her note gone.

He almost catches up half a block away, and she lets him follow for another hour before breaking loose. She could make the call from anywhere; she’s called from the road already. But suddenly she wants to see Neal.

It’s a risk, a stupid and sentimental one; for all she knows he’s not coming at all, and her note was taken by a pigeon and turned into a nest. But she wants to see him. So she circles back around, finds a vantage point on top of an overpass where she can see the payphone.

She waits for ten minutes, but she doesn’t see him. Crowds swirl through the terminal, occasionally blocking her view. Finally, maybe five minutes past noon, she dials the number she memorized nearly eight months ago.

A flash of movement catches her eye; someone running, cutting through the crowd toward the phone, and she knows it’s him before he picks up.

“Kate?”

He’s here. He found her map after all, somehow; he found her note and figured out the code. And all she can see is the top of his head, but his voice saying her name holds all the hope and loneliness and longing of the past months.

“Neal?”

“Kate.” And now she can _hear_ him grinning, breathless and happy and relieved. “Where are you?”

“I don’t have a lot of time.” She glances up and down the street; no sign of Maurice yet, but he can’t be far behind and if she’s out of his sight for too long they’ll all be suspicious. Fowler can’t know she has a phone, can’t know she’s made contact with Neal.

Neal doesn’t respond, but she sees him looking up, looking around; he knows she’s close. She can’t say how, but he _knows._ And she can see Mozzie beside him, now. Two seconds later, she realizes that can’t be a good thing; he wouldn’t let himself be seen with Neal in broad daylight at Grand Central unless the feds have already made him. But her first reaction is a flood of relief that Neal isn’t alone.

Finally, Neal says, “You’re here.”

“Neal?” She sees him move, and for a second she’s afraid he’s going to drop the phone and try to find her, and there’s no time for that. Even together they can’t run now, not with Maurice so close behind her, not with that tracker ready to give an alarm the instant he cuts it, not without a plan already in place. “Are you still there? Neal!”

But he stops, no longer looking around but staring up; he’s looking right at her; he sees her. It’s too far away to see, but she can hear his smile, soft and amazed. “Hi.”

For a few seconds she can’t find her voice; she fights the urge to wave, knows he’s too far away to see her trembling smile. Still he’s here, and she’s here, and there’s no glass between them now, only a few hundred yards of empty air. “Hi.”

And now he’s saying, “Stay there, I’m coming –“

“No!” He can’t; there’s no time, and it’s too dangerous. “Neal. Neal, he’s close.”

“The man with the ring?”

Who? Abruptly she remembers Fowler’s hand on her shoulder at that ATM, a flare sent up with a faint hope that Mozzie would see it. He must have seen it; Fowler’s hand must have been in the camera field; had he been wearing a ring that day? She can’t remember. He doesn’t normally, but he must have had one that day; Neal had fixed on that as the one identifying feature he could see.

“Yes.”

“I don’t care!”

“Listen.” Oh, God, Neal, please don’t do anything stupid. She wants to say so many things, but there’s no time, and they can’t waste these few minutes of unmonitored conversation. “I need you to tell me where you hid everything.”

A pause, and cold doubt crawls through her. He whispers, “What?”

“The money, the bonds, the art, all of it.” Oh, God, does he think she betrayed him after all?

“Why?” There’s doubt in his voice, now.

“He wants something from you.” And she wishes she could explain, but Fowler, damn him, won’t even tell her what he wants. “Something you took, something you hid.”

“I hid a lot of things.”

“Well, then, give him everything.” It’s bitter and exasperated and defeated; years of careful plans and daring heists, the wealth that would have bought home and stability and the villa in the Cote d’Azur. All of it, handed over to the feds without a thought, their shared dreams whittled and sanded and pounded down to something thin and polished, hard and bright. “If he gets what he wants, he’ll let me come back to you.”

_Together. Safe. Free._ This is all that matters, anymore. 

“Who is he?”

“I can’t tell you.” He’d try to go after Fowler himself, and it would be hopeless, would be suicide, a convicted felon on a GPS tracker going up against an OPR agent with few scruples about abusing his considerable authority. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

“Dangerous? Why? Kate, just tell me, I can protect you!”

He is alone, penned in by a two-mile radius and surrounded by enemies who can track his every move; he can’t protect himself. And he thinks he’s the one rescuing her.

“This is the only way you can help me.” Her voice is sharp, but she needs him to follow her lead on this. “You always told me I had to trust you. Well, now you have to trust me.”

And what scares her is he could do it, she has no doubt that if she asked him he’d find a way to take Fowler down and get her free, but he’d think nothing of destroying his own chances of eventual freedom, if not getting himself killed, in the process.

“I want to come home.” She lets her voice sound young and lost; please, let him see giving up his accumulated treasure as his grand sacrifice for her, if he wants to make one. She doesn’t know nearly enough about what they’re up against, here, but she knows it is too dangerous for any attempt at heroics. “Please, just tell me where you hid everything.”

She is not naïve enough to believe it’s a sure thing Fowler will let them go, although based on his reluctance to tell her anything about what he’s searching for, she suspects he doesn’t want to kill them. But she knows she has stalled long enough, and sending him on dead-end searches to caches long cold isn’t working anymore, and she doesn’t know what else to try.

“No.”

“I want to come home.” She stops before her voice cracks, but it isn’t faked this time; the weariness and uncertainty and fear bleeds through, finally, and she needs him to understand. She needs him to make this end; she needs this to be over.

“It’s the only leverage I’ve got,” he says. “Just stay there, okay, I’m coming up –“

And he’s gone before she can protest, dropping the phone, a dark figure disappearing into the crowd below the overpass; the hiss of the open line hurts, a sudden emptiness like an open wound. She can hear Mozzie, in the background, calling Neal’s name.

For a moment she stands there, paralyzed. She can’t wait for him. She can’t see him; Maurice will find her here any second.

“Kate?”

Moz. There’s no time, and only one thing left she needs to say, one thing she’s needed to say since the day she walked out of Sing Sing for the last time, everything she couldn’t say on camera trapped in her throat and choking her. 

“Mozzie, tell Neal I love him.” Oh, Moz, please watch him. Please don’t let him do anything stupid. “Tell him it’s the only way.”

She hangs up before he can respond. Glances up and down the street; she can hear running footsteps; she can’t stay here. Maurice can’t see her with Neal.

She knows how to disappear.

“Kate!” She can hear his voice behind her, ringing clear through the air for the first time in years, undistorted by a phone line or a microphone. Screaming her name. “ _Kate!_ ”

***

A young man in ripped jeans and a baseball cap is slouching in one of the lobby chairs when she comes back to the hotel; he stands quickly when she enters.

“Are you Kate Moreau?” He speaks quietly, motioning her toward the edge of the dining room, where the lights are dim and black-aproned waiters are going around lighting tiny oil lamps on all the tables. She glances back toward the lobby, at the doors and then toward the elevator bank. No sign of the feds.

“Who wants to know?”

“Got a message.” He hands her a folded slip of paper. It’s only two lines:

_We should talk. About Neal._

_Rm 117 9 PM Tuesday._

The signature is Peter Burke’s.

“What, is he after Neal’s stash now, too?” And how the hell did he find her here? She takes a slow, deep breath against the sudden sick thrill of adrenaline, glancing all around and lowering her voice to a whisper. “Does he think I’m an idiot?”

“Ma’am?” The young man blinks, looking confused. “He said to wait for a reply.”

She rolls the paper into a thin tube, fighting tears or hysterical laughter. She was so close to Neal; so close, and she couldn’t touch him or tell him half the things she needed to say. He’s a sitting target, trapped and helpless against whatever Fowler is planning now; she’s sure he’s planning something.

And now the man who started all of this, who locked Neal up in the first place, who’s keeping him here where he can’t run or defend himself from the danger approaching – now that man is after her, thinks he can summon her on a whim. 

She steps back and slowly lowers the paper through the top of the fluted glass covering the oil lamp on the table behind her, letting go when the flame licks and races up the edge. Then she gives the young man a level stare, waits until he blinks.

“Tell Burke he can go to hell.”

***

Two weeks later they all move into an executive suite on the top floor, with two bedrooms and a narrow balcony, a dining nook and a minibar; there’s also a wide open living room space that by evening has become a very cramped office. About a dozen agents with laptops perch on couches and various armchairs, surveillance equipment piled on the glass coffee table and a tangle of power cords covering the floor.

He has more allies in this than she thought. However, the increased number of agents has the effect of letting all of them assume someone else must be responsible for watching her. Fowler disappears for about a week, and while he’s not around she sits in a corner of the room playing solitaire on her laptop, quietly pretending not to overhear, while everyone assumes if she wasn’t supposed to be in the room someone else would have done something about it already.

They _are_ looking into Burke.

Three days after the bugs are planted on his phone she hears Neal’s voice, sleep-fogged and annoyed: _Peter, do you know what time it is?_

_It’s after nine, Neal._

_On a Saturday? Fine, fine, I’m on my way …_

She pictures him rolling out of bed and stretching, his hair sticking up in all directions, pulling curtains back to let in a flood of sunlight. Only the day before she stole three minutes on an unattended laptop and pulled up Google Maps, looked up every single coffee shop and art gallery within his radius; she clicked through the websites of any that had one, found menus for six or seven places and then stopped before an agent saw her or she made herself cry.

She doesn’t know why it had been the thought of him finally able to get a decent espresso that made her choke up and almost lose it.

His first real coffee on the outside, his first trip to a gallery - these were things they were supposed to have shared.

But now Fowler is back, dropping an overnight bag on the floor while the room practically snaps to attention; she’s about to leave and slip back to her bedroom when the bug picks up another call: _Hey, hon._

“Anything interesting?” Fowler asks, and the agents near the door shake their heads; he shrugs out of his coat with a sour look as Burke says _On my way to the office; Hughes says this can’t wait._

_So no time to chat, huh?_ That must be Mrs. Burke, sounding sympathetic and fond. _Miss you._

_Well, I’ve got …_ A pause _… ten minutes, before I get there. How’s it going in San Francisco?_

There’s a tender note in his voice, and suddenly she doesn’t want to hear this. She doesn’t care what useful things she might overhear; she doesn’t think she can take listening to Peter Burke and his wife having the sort of loving, normal, domestic conversation she can’t have with Neal right now.

_Only three more days,_ Mrs. Burke is saying, as Kate shuts the laptop with a snap and walks out of the room. 

She can still hear them from the bedroom, can hear Burke’s _can’t wait,_ so she goes out on the balcony, leans against the railing and lets the cold breeze and the rush of morning traffic wash over her. After a moment the sliding door opens and glides forcefully shut again; a bird startles out from the balcony next door. She looks up to see Fowler.

He doesn’t say anything at first, just stares out at the cars below them; she wonders if he, too, finds it easier to think and plan without being surrounded by so many people in a small space. Finally he turns to her with a look of resigned annoyance. “You and Maurice have fun playing tag while I was gone?”

She could pretend she hadn’t noticed him tailing her every time she left the hotel, much less deliberately slipped him. But by now they both know the other isn’t stupid. She shrugs. “It’s good for him. He needs the practice.”

He laughs, short and humorless and cold. “You know, I don’t give a damn where you go; I don’t have the people to keep you on a short leash. But you know what’ll happen if you take off and don’t come back before I get what I’m looking for.”

And she’d like to think he’s being overconfident, assuming she can’t get up to too much with the occasional twenty minutes free of anyone watching; she’s been careful not to drop off their radar for too long. She’d like to think so, but she has the unmistakable feeling again that he’s planning something.

“This would go a lot faster if you’d tell me what you’re after.”

He doesn’t respond to that; she waits for an answer, or more threats, but he only watches a trio of birds dipping and circling. The silence stretches for another minute, as he continues to ignore her, before she gets it.

He’s out here for the same reason she is.

He didn’t come out here to make threats she’s heard already; he’s here because he doesn’t want to listen to Peter Burke and his wife being adorably domestic on the phone any more than she does, Peter Burke and his wife who think that missing someone is being apart for three days.

Well, isn’t _that_ interesting.

He feels her eyes on him and looks up, eyebrows quirked and curious. “What?”

She says nothing, only turns away with a faint smile to watch a taxi pull up out front. She’s not sure, yet, how this will be useful. But any sign of weakness is worth noting.


	4. Chapter 4

The car is a classic, sleek and black with silver trim, idling by the back entrance of what smells like a pizza parlor; garlic and herbs waft into the alley as someone cracks the door to toss an armful of crushed cardboard in the direction of a dumpster. Kate waits until the door closes again before she steps out of the shadow of the alley.

“Katie!” Hale holds out his arms and she lets him wrap her in a bear hug; his jacket smells like old-fashioned pipe smoke, simpler days.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Get in here, it’s gonna rain.” The sky hangs low and heavy, grey overhead as he opens her door; she slides into the passenger seat while he goes around the other side. Warm brown eyes turn serious as he sits beside her and locks the doors. “What have you gone and got yourself into, Katie girl?”

“I wish I knew.” She swallows a lump in her throat at his sharp concern, leaning back in the seat. A saxophone plays quietly on the radio; she could almost pretend she’s here with Neal, the two of them still young thieves spending all their loot before they’ve sold it.

“Lot of people been asking about you. Hell, I’ve even heard Interpol’s been asking around.” He reaches up onto the dash, passes her a paper plate with two slices of pizza. Black olives, feta and artichoke; he even remembers her favorite pizza toppings. “Hey, we’re here anyway. Thought you might be hungry.”

She has to set the plate on her lap when her hands start shaking without warning; it’s been eight months, she realizes abruptly, since she’s been this close to a friend, since she’s felt safe even for a moment. She looks away, hands clenched together, until she’s sure she can speak normally. “Have you heard from Neal?”

“Not directly.” Compassion softens his face; his rumbling voice stays steady and serious. “Mozzie, a few times. They’re looking for you, too.”

“I know.” The pizza is still hot; she licks grease from her fingers. She slipped away from the hotel before breakfast, and had to move fast to get away from the agent tailing her; this one had been good, and a native New Yorker, she guessed. She’d had no time to stop for food on the way. “You coudn’t’ve got parmesan?”

“You are hard to please.” But he’s grinning fondly now.

“God, I don’t think I’ve had good pizza since -” She laughs, sudden and sharp and unexpected; that, too, is adrenaline more than anything, and she chokes it off before she can’t stop.

“You don’t want to be found.” He’s serious, now. Hale knows about Copenhagen and the stupid things they both did after; he knows about the whole mess.

“It’s not like that.” At his shrewd look: “I don’t want Neal mixed up in -” she waves the pizza slice in the air “- whatever this is. Any more than he is already.”

“He’s scared for you, girl.”

“Believe me, the feeling’s mutual.” And a hollow, cold spot opens in the pit of her stomach, just saying the words. “He didn’t ever tell you a place where he hid stuff, did he?”

“Oh, no.” He shakes his head.

“This guy wants something.” She looks away, keeps her eyes fixed in the side mirror as the first fat drops of rain hit and slide down the windshield. “Something Neal took and hid somewhere. I don’t know where and I don’t know what, but he’s going to hurt Neal if he doesn’t get it.”

“You tried asking Neal about it?”

“I did.” She can close her eyes and hear his voice, calling her name. “He won’t tell me.”

“Maybe you should trust him. Maybe he knows something you don’t.”

He won’t trust me, she thinks. I can’t protect him if he won’t trust me. But she doesn’t have much time and she didn’t call Hale for relationship advice, as desperately as she wants to stay here and listen to old jazz on the radio and rain on the roof and spill her guts for hours to someone who cares.

“Have you heard anything about Peter Burke looking for me?”

“I’d be as worried by who’s not looking for you,” he says. “Keller’s in town, did you hear?”

She frowns; she hadn’t heard. “If he’s not looking for me that’s a good thing.”

Her first date with Keller, which she only allows him to call a date because it’s easier than arguing with him, he took her to hear Tchaikovsky in the park. He’d made it sound like a group outing with other people going along, and she’d only agreed because she was pissed at Neal over something stupid she can’t remember now. She’d been surprised when it was just the two of them on a picnic blanket under a robin’s egg sky, with sandwiches and champagne, watching puffy white clouds drift by while the orchestra played Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Surprised and annoyed, and wary when he didn’t try anything; she wondered what his game was.

Hale nods once in firm agreement; he tried to tell her Keller was bad news long ago, before she figured it out herself. “It’s who’s looking for him. He went in on a job in Stockholm with the Russian mob, took all the money and ran.” 

She shakes her head; that would be just like Keller, to think he could pull off something like that. 

For a finale the orchestra played the 1812 Overture as originally scored. Keller had found them a spot as close to the cannons as anyone was allowed to be; she remembers the horses, harnesses twined with bright ribbons, dark bay with black tails twitching in the still heat. The gunners even had authentic uniforms like those worn by artillery crews in the time of Catherine the Great; the whole thing was put on by some local Russian heritage group, although she suspects they borrowed the guns from one of the Civil War reenactment units upstate.

“Now Sergei’s boys are here and they’ve paid a visit to everyone in New York Keller’s ever worked with, trying to make sure he can’t leave the city. They’re burning all his IDs and scaring the hell out of anybody might hide him or make him new ones.”

“Except us.”

She can close her eyes and feel the boom of cannon fire vibrating through the ground in perfect time with the percussion; she remembers watching the guns roll backward with the force of the recoil and the thin haze of blue smoke falling over everything, blurring the line of trees at the edge of the field, the rousing, triumphant final theme. She’d come home exhilarated, having forgotten to be annoyed or suspicious. She’d completely forgotten to be angry at Neal, leaning into his embrace like they’d never fought. She’d felt his hesitation, smelling the fine film of powder smoke still clinging to her hair.

And that had been Keller’s whole reason for taking her, she realized then. He took her because he knew it was something she would love that Neal couldn’t give her; he’d done it for no other reason than to rub Neal’s face in it afterward. He’d gone around humming that final theme for weeks.

“Well, Keller can’t go near Neal anyway with the feds watching. But you -” His voice drops, and he checks the rearview mirror. “It ain’t like no one knows you’re back in town,” he says. “Word’s out, and it’d be one thing if the Russians hadn’t found you yet, but they ain’t even looking.”

That was three weeks before the last job Neal and Keller pulled together, and she didn’t see him again until Neal left for Europe. What fascination she held for him was all about Neal; she was nothing to him but a shiny thing that was Neal’s, a game he played with Neal that he hadn’t been able to win yet. And there was nothing left, in the brief angry fling they’d had after Neal went to Copenhagen, once her initial fury faded to a dull grief for what she’d thought she and Neal had built together and a vague disgust at herself for forgetting what Keller was.

“So either they don’t know I used to run with Keller -”

“Or somebody bigger and badder than Sergei warned ‘em to leave you alone.”

“Now there’s a cheerful thought.” She aims for a light tone and fails completely.

“I don’t know who you’re with right now, but if he can scare the head of the Russian mob -”

She takes a deep breath, blows it out slowly. “Do you know where Keller is?”

He cocks his head at her, concerned and suspicious in equal measures. “Tell me you’re not gonna tempt Sergei, sticking your neck out for the likes of Keller?”

“Not unless I have to.” She hesitates, watching the view through the windshield waver through the rain, glass turned to rippling silver, then switches gears abruptly. “But he’s not what I came about. How much can you get me for Raphael’s _St. George and the Dragon?”_

He blinks. “You got your hands on a genuine Raphael? How -”

“Never mind how.” Neal been trying to get her attention, then, and she’d been torn between renewed anger that he thought he could buy her back with things and being touched and stunned that he remembered the one time she’d said it was her favorite the day they met. It’s also the only thing of value Neal stole that she knows exactly where to find.

“Off the top of my head, at least ten million. More, if you give me time to shop it around. How soon do you need the cash?”

Ten million ought to finance a jailbreak, if it came to that, though if Fowler can scare the Russian mob she’s not sure they can run far or fast enough. But she’s spent too much time reacting, and not enough making plans of her own; she needs something in reserve.

“I haven’t decided if I’m selling yet. But if I do need the money I’m gonna need it fast.”

“Raphael I can move fast.”

“Five percent?”

He frowns at her, then sighs deeply. “For you, two.” He holds up a hand when she opens her mouth. “But don’t tell nobody, all right? Don’t want people thinking I’ve gone soft.”

“I won’t. Hale -”

He shakes his head. “Folks like us, we can always get more money. Old friends are harder to replace, once you lose ‘em. Just don’t go and get yourself killed, all right?”

She can’t speak; she blinks rapidly several times and leans in to brush a quick kiss against his cheek before opening the door.

***

Neal and Keller pulled their last job together at an upscale ski resort in the Poconos. It was a three-man job, and Keller had lined up a third before they got there; none of them knew the guy, but Keller had worked with him before. Keller had also laid most of the groundwork, but the plan required a second expert safe-cracker and that was where Neal had come in.

Kate half suspected Neal only took the job because it gave him an excuse to pull out of a job Ryan Wilkes was planning (“I don’t like the direction that plan’s starting to go,” he’d confided to her, the day before they left), although Wilkes had left the offer on the table if they got back in less than a week and changed their minds.

Mozzie had insisted he and Kate should come along, as just-in-case backup. Privately, Kate suspected he wanted to get away from summer in the city for a week; the last three days they’d sat on the veranda of a little bed and breakfast not far from where Neal and Keller were staying, sipping coffee and playing cards after she’d gotten impatient with his attempts to teach her what she considered unnecessarily convoluted chess strategies.

They were in the room when Neal came back. Kate saw him first from the window, walking slowly up the winding gravel drive before disappearing under the porch roof. He looked pale and tired, shutting the door and throwing the bolt. It had just started to rain; she could smell it in the cool breeze through the open window, see raindrops dotting the shoulders of his suit. The left side of his dark jacket was soaked; he must have been splashed by a truck going through a puddle, was her first thought.

“Did you get it?” Mozzie looked up from his book as Kate moved toward the door; Neal half turned away, hesitating, as she was about to hug him. His movements were off, she realized, a little stiff and uncertain.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.

“No.” His voice was soft and oddly flat. He handed her an envelope. “It’s all here.”

A quick count revealed half of a take that should have been split three ways. “Neal, this is -”

“Mike’s dead.” And now Neal was shrugging out of his suit jacket and that dark spot wasn’t rain at all; half his white silk dress shirt was soaked with blood.

Mozzie barked, “ _Jesus_ , Neal!” coming out of his chair as the book fell with a thud; Kate stepped forward and stopped, staring.

“Oh.” Neal glanced down at his shirt as if only now becoming aware of it. “’S not mine.”

Kate said, carefully, “What happened?”

“He thought he dropped his passport.”

Mozzie’s face turned grim. “”He went back for it? Did they see you?”

“No.” Neal shook his head, slowly at first, then kept shaking it violently back and forth, as if to shake free from an image he didn’t want to see.

Kate caught his face between her hands. “Easy. Neal, look at me.” She didn’t think she’d ever seen so much blood; Neal’s eyes were shocky and vague and not quite tracking. “Hey.”

“Kate.”

“Hey.” She gave him an encouraging little smile, stuffed her own fears aside as he finally focused on her. “You’re all right. I’ve got you.” She could feel his hair, too, stiff and sticky with drying blood, could feel it sticking to her hands. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“Keller shot him.” He looked down, then, his eyes caught by the blood on his shirt again. “He was standing next to me, and -” One hand wiped at his shirt, like that would do anything.

She felt Mozzie’s alarmed look beside her, but didn’t take her eyes from Neal’s. She loosened his tie, passed it to Mozzie and started undoing the buttons on his shirt. She could see Keller, laughing, remember the times she’d responded in kind to his barbed flirtation, because the attention was flattering and it wasn’t like it meant anything.

She remembered hearing him and Neal argue over whether he should carry a gun; she had never imagined anything like this. The realization swept through her, sudden and sick and cold: he could have shot Neal instead.

“Did anyone hear?” She kept her voice level and encouraging; Neal was clearly in shock, and they couldn’t afford for her to lose it, too. “Where’s Keller now?” Thinking please, let him have already gone, far away; she didn’t think she could look at him now. “Did anyone follow you?”

“He had a silencer.” He shuddered, his eyes closing briefly. “I don’t know if - I don’t remember much, after -” He trailed off, his voice fading to a whisper as she peeled the shirt off of him; it was soaked and dripping blood on the floor.

She handed the shirt to Mozzie, and they exchanged a look; for all they knew, the police could already be on the way. Mozzie said, “I’ll clean up and get the truck ready.”

He stopped, though, as Neal said, “It was in his back pocket.” The words were raw and confused, and Mozzie’s grim expression softened into compassion. “The passport. Keller didn’t even wait for him to check.”

Mozzie looked at her, then, and said, “Five minutes, max.”

She nodded, took Neal’s hands in hers and led him to the bathroom while Mozzie started packing up, twisted the shower on and undressed quickly. Neal followed her without protest, stood quietly while she removed the rest of his clothes, let her tug him under the spray.

Blood ran down his neck as hot water hit his hair, swirls of red falling around their feet on white tile. She felt his breath catch, stepped quickly in front of him and pulled his head down to hide his face against her shoulder.

“Close your eyes,” she said against his ear. _Don’t look._ But oh, God, she could smell it, heavy and metallic under hot water and wrapping around them with the steam and now he was shaking and they had five minutes.

She grabbed the tiny shampoo from the shelf, squeezed half the bottle into her hand and massaged it into his hair; red water turned to pink foam swirling around the drain, and now the smell of lilacs mingled thick and cloying with steam and blood and sweat. Five minutes for him to fall apart, for her to put him back together, and no time at all for her hands shaking or the quiet thrumming panic beating at the back of her skull, the little hysterical voice saying, over and over, _it could have been Neal._

He stood quietly under her hands, head bowed as she washed him; she was swift but thorough. She needed this as much as he did; it was a hurried purification and the only absolution he would get, and for her a need to touch every part of him, to feel him warm and breathing and alive. The water ran clean when she was finished, and they had maybe twenty seconds to stand and lean into each other, foreheads resting together, before Mozzie pounded on the door.

She shut off the water and held his face close to hers. “Are you _here_ , now?” she asked, serious. “I need you with me, now, okay?”  
“Yeah.” He swallowed and nodded once; she watched him gather himself. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Mozzie had laid out clean clothes; the others had disappeared. They dressed quickly, strolled hand in hand down to the front desk; Neal flirted with the clerk as they checked out, walked out to the parking lot looking entirely unconcerned.

He started shivering again as the battered pickup pulled down the gravel drive; not visibly, but she could feel it; they both could, as he sat squeezed between them on the bench seat in the cab. He closed his eyes when they reached the highway, leaning his head against her shoulder; she combed her fingers through his wet hair. No one spoke.

They pulled into a rest stop in the dark some six hours later, parked at the edge of the lot away from any lights or cameras. With the engine off and the headlights dark, she couldn’t see Neal’s face when he said, “I’m taking the Wilkes job.”

A beat of careful silence, then Mozzie said, “I thought you didn’t like Wilkes.”

“I don’t.” He was only a shadow in the dark, sitting up and staring straight ahead. “He’s gonna hurt those people. Take a dozen hostages and then kill two or three to make an example, get everyone else to cooperate.” His voice sounded thin and fragile in her ears. “I can stop him.”

“How?” she demanded.

“He wants me to go in undercover and get to know everyone, gather intel. I can warn them, figure out a way to get them out of town.”

“And what happens when he figures out you’ve screwed him over?” Mozzie asked. “You know what he did to the last guy who tried to cheat him?”

“Why don’t we just call the cops?” she asked, trying to sound reasonable despite a sudden twist of cold fear; that Neal could pull off something like this she had no doubt, but she was less sure he’d live very long afterward. “Let them take Wilkes down. And distract them from coming after us for a while at the same time.”

Neal shook his head. “Not enough proof for them to go after him. I have to do this. I’ll tell him –“

Mozzie seized his arm before he could reach for his phone. “Sleep on it,” he said, quiet but firm; his fingers curled around Neal’s wrist and didn’t let go. “You’re exhausted right now, and you just came off a bad job. You just watched some guy get shot, and you’re in shock, and you are not making this decision tonight.”

Kate wanted to hug him. She felt Neal let out a long, shuddering breath, but he didn’t speak as Mozzie went on, “We can talk about this in the morning. After at least eight hours’ sleep and some decent coffee. Then, if you still want to sign on with a guy who likes to cut his enemies’ hands off for fun, and screw him out of half a million dollars, we’ll back you up. But not tonight.”

Mozzie slept in the cab. The rain had stopped a few hours ago, and the night was warm; Neal lay on his side in the truck bed. Kate curled up against his back and wrapped her arms around him, whispered “I love you,” into his neck. He didn’t answer, but his hand moved to grasp hers like a lifeline.

***

Fowler looks up from a file folder when she comes in. 

“I get the feeling you’re not taking all this seriously.” He pulls something from his pocket and throws it on the table. “Maybe this will change that.”

It’s a necklace; the pendant is a diamond teardrop the size of a grape, a deep pink color surrounded by smaller white stones.

“For me?” She holds it up to the light from the window; the chain is white gold, falling like water over her fingers. “You shouldn’t have.”

“What do you think?”

She blinks, both eyebrows lifting. “If you want me to tell you if it’s real, I’m going to need a magnifying glass. But I can tell you somebody’s got some serious equipment if it’s not; pink’s hard to fake in a stone this big.”

“It’s not.” And now he’s definitely smirking, and oh, she’s not going to like this at all. “Guess what you’ll see under a polarized light?”

He lays the folder flat on the table and those are Neal’s initials; she can hear him, a hundred times, saying _the worst part about forgeries is you can’t sign your work_ but surely he wouldn’t have - 

“You’re telling me Neal got his hands on an oven that can do this -” holding up the necklace “- in _two miles_?”

“Seems he’s found a way to hack the Marshals’ database and erase six hours of his tracking data the night the real one went missing.”

“Oh please. If he could do that he’d have escaped -” She stops, as it all suddenly, horribly, makes sense. “Neal found a way or you did?”

“What do you think?” He pulls the necklace out of her hand with a self-satisfied look. “Now ask yourself what a jury’s going to believe.” He drops it back into his pocket. “Just came from the office where we arrested him. He should be in processing -” a glance at his watch “- right now.”

She stares at him, her mouth dry and her mind racing, as he walks out. Thinks about the Raphael, and what it would take to set up a jailbreak, and how much good running did them the last time. The Russian mob is afraid of this man, or whoever he works for.

She needs information; she needs to know who she’s dealing with. She stares at the folder lying open on the table, the picture of the stone, Neal’s initials magnified against a deep, clear pink. 

There’s a French term in chess; she’s heard Neal use it, though chess is one game she rarely played with him. _Pis aller._

The move of last resort.

She pulls out her phone; closing her eyes, she can still smell steam and old blood and lilacs. She texts Hale: _Tell Keller meet me tomorrow at 9 AM coffee shop on 5th and I’ll get him out of the country._

Takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, then adds: _I need to borrow a photo studio._

***

Dylan takes one look at her and says, “I’m doing this for Hale, not for you. I want no part of whatever you and Caffrey got into this time.”

Kate just nods thanks and heads into the back of the trailer, where thick black drapes will make for an effective darkroom come nightfall. 

She has a clean passports and an old photo of Keller from about five years ago. Stripping the laminate off of Vivian Smith’s photo takes time, and redoing it will take longer, but half of all art is patience, as her freshman art survey professor told her.

Of course, he was the same professor who told her “art won’t keep you alive, but it will give you something to live for,” which goes to show how much he knows.

She stops by the library on her way home, lifts a card off a distracted teenager and logs in on one of the public computers. She prints a copy of Fowler’s personnel file off her flash drive, and then pulls up Travelocity.

***

She shakes her tail loose somewhere north of 39th and goes underground, emerging from the subway two blocks from the coffee shop where she broke up with Keller, a month and a half after Neal left for Europe.

The menu hasn’t changed. At 8:30 she asks for a table by the wall, leans back against rose-patterned wallpaper, orders an espresso and a cinnamon chip muffin. Then she texts a cab driver she knows and tells him to be here at ten past.

She sees Keller from the window. At a distance he’s unremarkable; not particularly tall, in faded jeans and a battered brown jacket, hat pulled down over a face that’s thoroughly forgettable until he’s actually looking at you.

“Katie,” he says; he doesn’t sweep the hat off and bow. The place isn’t crowded, but they’re not alone and he can’t afford to attract attention. “I didn’t know you cared.”

She wore the wide-brimmed straw hat in part so Keller couldn’t lean in and kiss her; he takes her hand instead, presses his lips to her fingers. Neal can pull off a gesture like that; Keller really can’t.

“How many times have I told you not to call me that?”

“I’ve lost count.” He sits in the chair next to her - mostly, she suspects, because like her he wants his back to the wall and his eyes on the door, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to put his arm around her shoulders. “What’s this about getting me out of the country?”

She pulls an envelope from under her jacket, takes out the plane ticket and slides it toward him; he picks it up as the waiter approaches with her muffin and a tiny mug.

“Coach? _Really_ , Katie?”

She takes a slow sip of espresso, savoring, and sets the mug down carefully. “I don’t care _that_ much.”

After the waiter leaves, “Who’s Vivian Smith and why’s he going to Norway”

She holds up the passport. “It’s clean. Neal’s work. Well, with some modifications of my own.”

She’d changed the sex and the photo, redone the lamination and the holographic seal. He nods appreciatively, reaching for it; she tucks it back into the envelope and pulls out the file on Fowler.

He says, “I’m guessing this isn’t for old times’ sake.”

“I need information.” She looks up, sweeping a glance around the room and lowering her voice. “You’re going to dig into an FBI agent for me.”

“Burke?” And then, when she shakes her head: “He’s looking for you, too, I hear.”

“I know that. He wants a meeting.” She shrugs. “He’s not going to get one. Can we focus, please?” She can only deal with one fed at a time. “For now you’re looking into this guy.”

“OPR?” His eyebrows go up as she passes him the file. “What’s his game?”

“You tell me. All I know is he’s after something Neal took.”

“OPR doesn’t handle recovery of stolen property.” He frowns. “You’re tangling with somebody high up, here. Rumors have been going around.”

“So Hale tells me.” She gives him a level look, spreading jam on her muffin. “But I’m not the one who thought I could rip off the Russian mob and get away with it.”

He tips his head toward her: _touché_. “What do you think I’m going to find on him in Norway?”

“He spent five days there last August. Flew into Oslo on the third and back to DC on the seventh.” She sets the knife down, leans in to flip through several pages of the file. “I want to know why.”

“Oslo’s pretty far outside FBI jurisdiction.” He looks intrigued.

“Officially, he was on bereavement leave at the time.”

“Unofficially?”

“I want to know what he was up to.” She shuffles a few more pages, brushes crumbs off the white linen tablecloth. “Less than a week after he got back from this trip, all his case files from ten years in Violent Crimes are sealed and he’s transferred into OPR.”

He leans back in his chair, unobtrusively scanning the street outside the window before he asks, “What are you looking to find?”

“Anything.” She signals the waiter, orders another espresso and waits for him to leave before going on. “Who is this guy? Besides the reason your Russian friends aren’t going to string me up by my thumbs for giving you this?” She waves the passport at him. “Who does he work for? What does he want? Why’s he interested in me, or Neal? I need to know who I’m dealing with here.”

“You want me to help you rescue Neal.” Now he sounds amused.

“I’m also rescuing _you,_ in case you hadn’t noticed.” She’s in no mood to play games with him. They both know he needs her as much as she needs him; he’s not going to make her beg. “Unless you think you can convince Sergei Stockholm was just a minor misunderstanding. I’ve already called a cab to take you to LaGuardia.” She holds out the passport, raises both eyebrows. “Should be here in five minutes. You want to stay here with the Russians beating the bushes up and down the city, or do you want to get a few thousand miles ahead of them and help me out at the same time?”

He takes the passport with a little smile, folds the ticket around it and tucks it in his shirt pocket. “What makes you so sure I won’t take this and disappear?”

“Because I know you.” Her answering smile holds no warmth. She’s asking him to take a risk, digging into Fowler and whoever might be behind him; still she doesn’t hesitate to give him everything and let him go, trusting he’ll uphold his end of their deal once he’s out of the country.

She’s a game he plays with Neal, and this is his chance to steal a move. 

He’ll do this for one reason: so he can tell Neal, next time they meet, that she came to him when she was in danger and in desperate need of help. Because he can give her something Neal can’t and rub Neal’s face in it; because he just might save her life when Neal can’t.

Keller won’t pass up a chance like this.

She writes her phone number on the corner of a napkin; once he’s read it, she tears off the corner and flicks a lighter at the edge, watches the edges blacken and curl under the flame before dropping it in her empty espresso mug.

You don’t pull the job with the partner you want, Mozzie always said. You pull the job with the partner you’ve got.

Neal can’t protect her now, whatever he thinks; he’s vulnerable enough already. She can’t ask Mozzie for help; she needs him to protect Neal. What she’s asking will be dangerous, and she cares far less about Keller getting hurt.

A car horn sounds outside; she looks up to see a taxi idling at the curb. “That’ll be your ride.”

He reaches into his backpack; she freezes as he pulls out a gun, but he reverses it and holds it out to her. When she only stares at it, he sets it on the table, hidden behind the menu stand.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” At his _oh, please_ look: “Fowler’s not working alone. Shooting him isn’t going to solve anything.”

“Take it when you go and meet with Burke.”

Her voice turns cold. “I’m not meeting with Burke.”

“You should go see what he has to say. You might find he’s surprisingly reasonable, you point that at his head.” He shrugs as he stands. “Or leave it here. Your choice. But they’re not gonna let me take it on the plane.”

She deliberately doesn’t look at the gun. “You should go.”

He glances out the window, scanning up and down the street. “I know you didn’t give me the last clean passport you’ve got.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We could go south instead. Argentina’s got great wine and the best steaks you’ve ever tasted.” He tilts his head at the window as the cab honks again. “And no extradition treaties. We could disappear. No one’ll find us. Not the feds, not this Fowler, not Neal.”

And she remembers that look, the way he smiles, like he’s sharing a joke that’s not funny or a plan to hurt someone.

That was all they ever shared, in the end.

“I’m pretty sure Neal could find me in Argentina.” And she wouldn’t be against Fowler finding her there, either.

“Not if you don’t want to be found.”

But she does want Neal to find her, when this is over and they’re safe. And if the last few months have taught her anything it’s that she’s not as good at disappearing as she once thought.

“I like New York.”

“You’re stronger than him.” He says it like that should be reason enough for her to leave.

“I know.” She meets his eyes steadily. More important, she’s stronger than the person she was the last time she went with Keller. “You’re going to miss your flight.”


	5. Chapter 5

“What does Caffrey want with a bakery?”

Kate looks up from her fifth solitaire game of the afternoon, which she’s currently losing; she shifts cards randomly back and forth while her mind is elsewhere, wondering about the best routes out of the country and what the going rate is, these days, for bribing prison guards. Neal has been back behind bars for almost three days and Kate’s mind is spinning over in futile circles like a rat trapped on a wheel.

Neal planned and executed a jailbreak with far less resources and freedom of movement than she has now.

Of course, getting him out is only half of it; keeping him out - and alive - will be harder.

“He loves those almond bear claws,” she says absently, over the hum of the shredder at the other end of the room; they’ve been shredding transcripts of Burke’s phone calls all morning, since Neal’s lawyer put in a request for all his files. And, at Fowler’s impatient scowl, “I’m serious. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Why?”

“Apparently he just bought one.”

It takes her a moment to realize he means a bakery, and not a bear claw; she sits up, then, peering at the stack of papers he’s dropped on the coffee table. The address has been blacked out, but at the bottom of the lease she can see Neal’s signature. And next to it, the signature of his attorney.

_D. Haversham._

She blinks.

Several thoughts run through her mind at once; so they made Moz, finally. Followed by, when did he become a lawyer? Relief, that he’s not alone on the inside, that Moz can visit, now.

And a sudden, sharp, inexplicable sense of loss, and a twist of something like jealousy, that visiting him is what she does, that something which was hers has been stolen.

The arraignment is two days later; Fowler has gone out and she’s sitting alone in the hotel lounge, sprinkling cinnamon into her cappuccino, when a breaking news alert flashes onto the TV screen above the bar. The announcer’s voice, faint over the whir of the coffee grinder, is saying “… on the lookout for a fugitive,” and she’s looking at Neal’s mug shot.

She doesn’t stop, doesn’t think; rising smoothly, she takes her coat from the back of her chair and walks out of the lounge toward the hotel lobby. She recognizes Maurice by the door; he can’t see the lounge TV from there; he doesn’t know. He’ll follow her as he always does, but he won’t think to call for backup, won’t suspect she’s running and not coming back.

Neal is out, with no tracker, somewhere in Manhattan. This is their chance. They can run. Together.

First she has to find him.

She walks briskly outside and sprints up the street, ducking into an alley and behind a neighboring restaurant before Maurice can make it to the door.

***

She doesn’t get the details until six hours later, hunched over a public library computer with her hat pulled over her face, reading the brief Yahoo! News account of the escape and reminding herself over and over that she, too, is a fugitive and that triumphant laughter or high-pitched squeals of delight would very likely attract attention she can’t afford right now.

He bought a bakery.

She stares for a moment at the image on the screen, a side view of a bright orange awning stenciled with “The Greatest Cake” (oh, God, was that Neal’s pun or Mozzie’s?), both hands pressed over her mouth to hide a grin that might crack her face wide open. Then she hits “print”, tells the print dialog box hell, yes, she wants to print in color and she doesn’t care if it’s thirty cents extra and tries not to dance on her way over to the line of printers along the wall of the computer lab.

_He bought a bakery._

She pulls the picture out of the printer, folds it carefully in quarters and presses it to her lips. _God I love you._ Then she tucks it into the inside pocket of her coat next to her heart.

He bought a bakery _and used it in a jailbreak._

“Moz. You guys are _brilliant._ Where are you?”

She leaves messages on all three cell phone numbers she has for him; she doesn’t know what number Neal’s using now.

“Oh. My. God. I will never forgive either one of you for leaving me out of this one. Never for as long as I live. Call me, this number.”

Keller can have his guns; Keller can eat his fucking _heart_ out; anyone can use a gun. Neal has something better. Neal has _style_.

“Guys, where are you? What’s the plan? Please tell me you haven’t stopped using this number. Call. Me.”

It’s late at night and she’s alone in a subway car, finally, when she allows herself a single whoop of triumph, punching the air; this turns into a flood of laughter as she sinks into a seat, exultation and relief edging into high-pitched hysteria and for a long time she can’t stop, can’t breathe, bent over and rocking back and forth.

He’s still got it. Eventually, she can draw her knees up to her chest, hide her face against her knees; she’s still breathing hard, and she can feel tears drying on her face, but the three women who get on at the next stop are too deep in their own conversation to pay much attention. He’s still _him_. 

She breathes out a long, shaky sigh; she can almost see him, half-hidden by the glare on that glass, talking about a bakery in Paris. She’d been so afraid they’d taken something vital from him; she’d been terrified that prison had broken him in ways that could never be healed, stolen his nerve and crippled his spirit and ripped away the _joy_ he once took in life, in a heist coming together or an intricate painting or an afternoon at the park. She hadn’t known how scared she was, all those years, that the man who came back to her wouldn’t be _Neal_ anymore, that a cage would crush everything that made him who he was, until she heard of him back in action today. And relief hits her like a hammer blow, leaving her stunned and overwhelmed.

He is not broken. They can’t break him; they will never break him.

He is brilliant. He is amazing; he is glorious and he is hers, all hers. 

Her phone is buzzing.

“Moz!” she hisses, looking up, cautiously checking that no one is listening. “That was _amazing_. You guys are - where is he? What’s the plan?”

“Kate.” Mozzie sounds tense and unhappy. “Where are you?”

“I don’t - I’m on a subway, somewhere. I shook off the feds this morning as soon as I heard, but I can’t stay ahead of them forever. Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us out of here.”

“Well, if you hadn’t -” He stops. “Look, I don’t know what you think is going on, but it’s not going to be that easy.”

She sighs. “Moz, come on.” He’s upset; she gets that. He probably blames her for Neal being stupid, and she’s not certain he’s wrong to do so, and Mozzie has never been the most trusting person to begin with. But they don’t have time for this now. “I know -” She stops. “Things have been complicated,” she says, quietly. “And I’m sorry I had to keep you guys out of the loop. I am.” She pauses again, waits, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Please. Just tell me where he is, Moz.”

She hears him sigh. “Right now he’s probably still in the suit’s kitchen.”

“The - who? What?” He’s not making sense.

“Last time I heard from him,” and the words are clipped and angry, “he was in the kitchen at the Burkes’ house. Where he’d been all afternoon, after Mrs. Burke helped him sneak past the detail posted outside.”

“ _What?_ ” For a moment there’s only the hiss of the open line, and the rattle of the car along the tracks. “I don’t understand.”

“He went out a fourth story window into a bakery awning - do you know how much it costs to buy a bakery in downtown Manhattan these days? - distracted pursuit with a van while he escaped into the sewers, disappeared off the radar of every law enforcement agency in the city and then voluntarily showed up at the house of the suit who arrested him in the first place.”

Mozzie isn’t pissed at her, she realizes abruptly. He’s furious at _Neal_.

As he should be. “Moz!” she wails, then quickly drops to a whisper as another passenger turns around. “How could you -” she starts.

At the same time as he says, “If you only -”

They both stop; there’s no time for this, and nothing to gain by it. “What’s going on, Kate?” he asks, finally.

She sighs. “I’m trying to figure that out.” The lights flicker as the train picks up speed; she’ll have to go back, she realizes. The brief thrill of freedom is gone as abruptly as it appeared. Neal is back in custody and so is she; she can’t be free as long as Fowler can get to him.

And this, too, is Neal - glorious, brilliant, and at times so utterly, blindingly stupid.

Mozzie says, “Neal’s suit thinks you and your suit are in this together to get ahold of his stash and split it between you.”

“Oh, ask me if I give a damn what Peter Burke thinks of me.” But something twists painfully in her chest as she asks, “What does Neal think?”

“Neal doesn’t know what to think. I mean, you tell him you’re breaking up with him with five months left, then you disappear and the next thing he hears from you is where is all the loot? What are people supposed to think?” 

His voice softens. “Look, he knows you’re in some kind of trouble but you won’t tell him who or what or where you are and so he can’t do anything to help. He’s out of his mind worrying about you. And, you know, he might not be the only one. Who’s a little bit concerned, here.”

“Awww, Moz.” She has to blink several times before she can see properly.

“Where are you now? What are you doing?”

She sighs. “On my way back to where I was before all this.”

“If you’re with who I think you’re with, this guy is bad news.”

“Moz.” Her voice is sharp. “This is me. I don’t know what the hell kind of screwed up Stockholm thing is going on between Neal and Burke, but I know better than to trust a fed. I know he’s not on my side.”

He doesn’t say anything for almost a minute. Then, “You still have my DVD.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You’ll have to steal another one.”

“So you’re really going back to him.”

“I don’t have a choice. If Neal hadn’t gone back -” She stops; they can’t change what happened.

Now his voice is grave. “Is that safe?”

“As safe as any other options I’ve got right now.” She sighs. “I don’t know. He’ll probably kill me in the morning.”

“Funny.” Mozzie snorts. “Well, while you’re off playing Dread Pirate Roberts, I guess that leaves me to watch the princess.”

She smiles in spite of herself. “Stay close to him, Moz.” Their positions have reversed; now he gets to see Neal, while she’s the one who has to stay away. “God, I don’t know how you made it through four years -”

“Look, Kate, if you’d just _tell_ him what’s going on -”

“Can you honestly swear to me he won’t tell Burke everything I tell him?”

Mozzie sighs, sharp and frustrated; after a long silence, he says, “No.”

“Then you know I can’t.” And she hears him make a noise like he’s about to protest, but he doesn’t. “I need you both to trust me on this one.”

“Kate,” Mozzie says, and there’s another long pause. Then, finally, “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”

She swallows. “So do I.”

***

Back at the hotel, she lets the door slam behind her; half a dozen agents look up from their laptops in identical comic startlement.

Fowler is on the phone; he sees her, and says slowly, “I’ll call you back.”

“Miss me?”

His frustrated look shifts into something still and hard; he stares at her for a moment and she watches him, wary but not about to back down. Then he looks away long enough for a sweeping glance around at the other agents. That’s all the signal they need to clear out.

 _You want a fight, you’ve got one,_ she thinks; she’s been quietly fuming all the way back to the hotel, forced by Neal’s inexplicable surrender at the moment of victory to come slinking back here with her tail between her legs; she’s been furious all night and looking for a target.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you went out for coffee, last night.”

“Please.” She leans against the back of the couch and doesn’t take off her coat. “I did exactly what anyone with half a brain handed such an opportunity would have. You know damn well why I left and you know why I’m back, and if it’s all the same to you we can assume whatever threats you’re about to make are understood and we can skip that part, too. I’ve had a long night and I imagine so have you, and I’d just as soon get some sleep.”

“As long as we understand each other.” He gives a cold shrug. “I’ve got time. He dodged a bullet this time around, but he’s in a bad position, still.” He leans forward, the next words slow and patient and precise. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“I can’t give you a location if you won’t tell me what you’re looking for.” She glares at him. “I don’t remember every single thing he ever stole.” Neal had a long career before she met him, after all. “For all we know he could have stashed whatever it is in Europe, or -” They’d spent nearly a year apart, when -

She stops, staring at Fowler.

_No. No, it can’t be._

She walks over to the balcony doors, closes her eyes and barely restrains herself from putting her fist through the glass.

It’s the one thing that could explain all this. The greatest treasure Neal ever stole, the prize he went after without her. What was supposed to be the big one, their last score, all their dreams come true.

 _It can give us the life we want,_ Neal had said. Instead it had torn them apart.

And it isn’t done with them yet.

She wishes she’d never heard of the damn thing.

The last piece falls in with a click like a bullet sliding into the chamber; she looks up and the fury is gone, replaced by something weary and heartsick and cold.

“You’re after Catherine the Great’s music box.”

It’s not a question. Fowler freezes for a half a second, looking at her, and it’s all the answer she needs.

His eyes close briefly; something unreadable crosses his face, and when he looks at her again he’s not angry, only resigned.

“Do you know where it is?”

She flings up her hands in helpless frustration; she has no idea. And she can’t do this right now. She doesn’t answer, walking past him into her bedroom and slamming the door, staring at the wall and fighting tears. 

She wants to kick a hole in the wall, she wants to shake both their younger selves for being blind and stupid. They’d been so young, spending time like it was other people’s money. And now they’ll never get it back.

***

She calls Neal, three days later after he’s officially cleared of all charges. She’s not sure what she’s going to tell him; she knows as soon as the operator picks up (”FBI, this call is being recorded”) that she can’t mention the music box on this line. But she has no other number for him, and she needs to hear his voice.

He says her name like it’s a lifeline.

She can’t tell him anything.

It’s for his own protection. ( _I’m doing this for us,_ Neal had said, before he left for Copenhagen.)

She says _he’s close to you_ ; she says _you can’t trust anyone_. She doesn’t say _what were you thinking?_ , doesn’t say _we could be halfway to Paris by now._

***

She tells Burke about the music box. It’s the one thing that might come out of that disastrous meeting; against her better judgment she takes Keller’s gun. It’s a bluff and a stupid one, and Burke sees through it two seconds flat and she’s off balance for the rest of the meeting.

She can’t tell if he’s protecting his asset or if there’s genuine affection for Neal, there.

He looks in her eyes as he’s leaving; she holds her face blank, doesn’t let any of her fear for Neal show when he says _did you ever love him?_

That’s something, at least. Better if Burke thinks she doesn’t love Neal; she won’t give him anything he can use against her.

***

For nearly a week after Neal is officially cleared of all charges, she doesn’t leave the hotel; the other agents have apparently been ordered to keep her in the building. So, with nothing else to do and with solitaire growing less and less amusing, and an itch under her skin to run and the feeling that the longer she waits to do something the more reckless and stupid that something is going to be, she sneaks into the hotel’s business center and prints off another copy of the picture from that news article. A quick search reveals the bakery has a website - Mozzie was thorough - with several pictures of the interior and a copy of the menu. She prints those, too, along with a copy of Neal’s mug shot, and asks the clerk at the front desk to send them out to the copy shop down the street, to have them made into “the biggest damn posters you’ve got”.

“Have them charge it to our room,” she says brightly.

She picks up the posters in the lobby the next day and covers an entire wall of her bedroom, and spends half an hour staring at her handiwork before she decides drawing pink sparkly hearts all over everything would probably be overkill.

Probably.

The look on Fowler’s face, the first time he sees it, will keep her warm on cold nights for years to come.

After that no tries to stop her going out; the agents go back to tailing her not-so-discreetly, and she’s careful not to disappear on them for a little while, at least. Two days after that, Fowler leaves for DC and doesn’t come back for almost a month.

About a week after he gets back, she gets a text from an unknown number: _park 12 PM tomorrow by the pond MK._

***

“Have you turned completely suicidal or is Sergei mellowing in his old age?”

Keller sits on a park bench, shaded by a tree; he throws something at the water and four brown and white ducks converge on the ripples, heads darting underwater and coming up with a shake.

“Beautiful day,” he says, gesturing at the empty space beside him and handing her a slice of stale bread. “Peaceful out here, don’t you think? Just us and the ducks.”

She sits, balancing a cup of coffee on the arm of the bench and watching the shadow of a branch shifting back and forth with the breeze across the gravel path. “What are you doing back in the country? Last I heard, the Russians are still looking for you here; they think you’ve gone to ground somewhere in New York.”

“I’m about to solve that problem.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.” She tears off a bit of bread, tosses it toward the path with a flick of her wrist. Two ducks and an enterprising squirrel rush the spot where it lands.

“Neal’s going to help.” He leans back, arms crossed behind his head, with half a smile at her skeptical look. “He doesn’t know it yet.”

Skepticism edges into alarm. “What are you dragging him into?”

“Nothing dangerous. Just a little friendly competition. For old times’ sake.” A full smile, now, and she sits up straight and glares at him. “A chance to finish an old chess match.”

She draws her arm back and barely misses knocking over her coffee cup, flinging another bit of bread at the water. Her voice is quiet and clipped. “We had a deal.”

“Katie.” He turns his best approximation of a hurt look in her direction. “ _Katie._ You think I’d run out on our deal? After everything we’ve shared?”

“Cut the crap, Keller.” And then, as his expression turns faintly smug again, she realizes, “You found something.”

“You didn’t think I’d come back with nothing?” A squad of ducks pass slowly in a line, stippled brown and iridescent green, dawdling hopefully beside the bench then moving on, quacking sadly. He pulls a folder out of his backpack, taps it against his knee. “Your fed’s a piece of work.”

“Coming from you, that is truly frightening.”

“You wound me.” A hand over his heart and a sad shake of his head; she rolls her eyes.

“Ask me if I give a damn.” She waves at the folder. “What did you find?”

“Fowler arrives on the third and checks in here.” He opens the folder across his knees, hands her a photo of a hotel, a picturesque ski-resort in the off-season; a few well-dressed tourists are visible on the manicured lawn and snow on the mountains against the horizon. “Nice place. Make sure you try the port, if you ever get a chance to visit. He stays here four nights, catches a cab out front for the airport on the morning of the seventh.”

“So he stayed in the same hotel the whole time?”

Keller nods. “As far as anyone there can recall. And a bartender remembers him watching this guy.” He pulls out another photo, this one with the grainy look of security camera footage; she sees a man in his mid-thirties, casually dressed. The face is unremarkable but alert, his head cocked to one side as if he’s just heard something. The image is dark, but she can see shapes that look like cars parked in a line behind him. “Alan Mulvany. He checked in three days before. Night of the fourth he and Fowler were both in the bar; bartender remembers them both. Says Fowler took a seat in a corner, ordered one drink and stayed about three hours, watching Mulvany the whole time.”

She taps the photo. The name is unfamiliar, but on closer examination she’s almost certain she’s seen his face before. “Who is he?”

“Name’s an alias. He flew into Oslo from Baltimore, but there’s no record of him anywhere before that. Wasn’t able to trace his real name.”

“I’ve seen him before.”

Keller frowns at her, surprised. “No one I’ve ever worked with.” He hands her the photo, and she squints at it; it’s there, tugging at the back of her mind, just out of reach; she’s seen that face. “They’ve got cameras covering every inch of the hotel parking garage; some pretty fancy cars in there. This is him coming into the garage around eleven, maybe half an hour after he leaves the bar.” He points to the timestamp in the corner. “And then there’s a ten minute gap in the tape.”

“Someone erased the tape?” She blinked. “Or turned the cameras off?”

“Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly. Next thing you can see is this.”

He hands her another photo; the image quality is poor enough she might think she’s looking at a pile of old clothes. But she’s pretty sure she isn’t. She can see a dark spot spreading out across the cement beneath it.

“Dead?”

He nods. “He’d been beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places, according to the medical examiner.”

“Did they find prints?” She leans forward, peering at the folder; the coroner’s report is on top, a hasty, skewed photocopy. “Evidence? Did you get a copy of the police report?”

“Oh, no, this is where it gets interesting.”

“More interesting than a dead body in a parking garage?”

“Official police report said death was by natural causes.” He shakes his head. “Morning of the fifth, just after this -” he points at the photo “- is discovered, five hundred thousand dollars gets deposited in the local police commissioner’s account.”

“Someone paid him off to bury this. And got him to erase the tape, too, probably.”

Keller grins at her, and there’s a light like the thrill of the hunt in his eyes. “Ask me where the money came from.”

“You traced - ?” Her eyes widen. “Where’d the money come from?”

“Washington, DC.” He hands her the folder, now. “From an account linked to the Department of Justice.”

“OPR.” It’s a whisper. She lets out a long breath, turns away and leans back against the bench. Stares at the grassy bank on the other side of the path, sloping down to the pond, at the surface of the water, ruffled and creased into folds by the breeze, throwing back a shaky reflection of the cloudless sky. 

“If Fowler got paid for this - besides the promotion into OPR - it didn’t go to any account I could link to him.”

“Who was this guy?” She stares at the first photo again. “Terrorist? Drug dealer?” She still can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen him before. “This doesn’t even sound like an FBI operation. I mean, covert assassinations? In a foreign country? Shouldn’t that be CIA, or something?”

Keller shrugs. “Whoever’s behind this, they’ve got connections in very high places.”

She doesn’t look at him, asking, “Do I want to know how you found out all this?”

“Probably not.”

“So there’s a good chance I’m sharing a hotel suite with a contract killer working for the US government.” She laughs, high and shaky.

“Argentina’s nice, this time of year. You sure you don’t want to disappear?”

She wants to crawl in a hole and hide. But that won’t help anything. She makes herself breathe deeply, then takes a slow sip of cold coffee. “I’ve uncovered my very own government conspiracy,” she says, finally. “Mozzie would be so proud.”

Keller barks a laugh at that. “Oh, Katie. We could have been something.” He shakes his head. “Let’s get out of here. You don’t belong with Neal. You’re like me.”

“No.” She stands up, closing the folder and zipping it carefully under her jacket. “No, I’m not.”

“You’d better be.” He stands with her, looking grim. “These people don’t mess around. If you two are both gonna survive this, one of you has to be as ruthless as they are. And I think we both know Neal can’t be. He never could do what’s necessary.”

She shivers, thinking, _beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places_ and he’s waiting for her at the hotel, he’ll be suspicious if she’s not back soon. The Russian mob is afraid of this man, and with reason.

And now he’s going after Neal.

***

She stops again at the library on her way back, just long enough to borrow a scanner and email Mulvany’s picture to Hale. If he’s anyone she or Neal ever worked with, Hale will remember him.

She owes Mozzie an apology.

This is the thought running through her mind as she pushes through the revolving doors in the hotel lobby. Every time she rolled her eyes, or sighed, or shared a secretly amused glance with Neal while he went on about conspiracies and the men in black and the truth being out there, the sinister nature of The Man and all the things the government doesn’t want you to know.

Maybe he really is onto something about the moon landing. She should watch that DVD, next time, instead of snarking through the whole thing. If she makes it out of this alive, she’ll never laugh at his theories again.

There’s an agent pretending to read a newspaper in the lobby; she sees him touch his shirt cuff and adjust his hair as she walks past, doubtless alerting everyone she’s back. Her hands are cold; she twists them together as she waits for the elevator. She’s shivering all over, she realizes; she closes her eyes once the elevator starts to rise, forces herself to breathe slowly.

They’re on the top floor, and so she has time to compose herself by the time she gets back to the room.

“Your boy’s awfully fond of Burke,” Fowler snaps at her, like she hasn’t just dropped off the radar for more than an hour.

He’s alone in the living room, pacing through and around the crisscrossing power cords, wheeling to glare at her as if this is her doing, somehow.

“Oh?” She stops, wary.

“How else do you explain _this_?” He flings something down on the glass coffee table; it bounces with a clinking sound and skids to a halt by the table’s edge.

It’s a miniature videocassette tape. She picks it up, turns it over and stares at it. “What’s on here?”

“Nothing.” The words are clipped and sharp. “Absolutely. Nothing.”

Her eyebrows go up. The right kind of magnets will do that, she knows. “Was there supposed to be something on it?”

“Evidence. Which could take him down, if that wasn’t the only copy.”

“Evidence of what?”

“Burke accepting a bribe.” He shakes his head. “More likely Burke trying to set a trap and then turning around and catching his own leg in it, but it all looks the same to a jury.”

The image of Peter Burke caught in a trap of his own making is more satisfying than it probably should be.

And Fowler thinks Neal somehow erased it? She grits her teeth, staring at the tape; she’d like to think Neal took a calculated risk, weighing his chances of going back inside if Burke lost his job compared to the chances of getting caught tampering with evidence. But she’s no longer certain he won’t take risks for Burke simply out of misguided loyalty.

A third felony conviction would mean twenty-five years. And all to protect the man responsible for the first two. She wants to shake Neal until his teeth rattle.

She drops the tape and retreats to her bedroom, shrugging out of her coat and stowing it and the folder out of sight under a pile of blankets. Her phone lights up with an incoming text as she’s about to hide it, too: _No one I know._

Hale.

She stares at the phone before slipping it into her coat pocket. She’s seen that man; she’s sure of it.

And then, because there’s still no one else in the living room and she’s still terrified and that’s starting to make her angry, she leaves the bedroom and half-slams the door and goes over to where Fowler is making coffee in the dining nook, plants both hands on the counter beside the coffee pot and waits until he looks at her and demands, before she can think better of it, “Who was Alan Mulvany?”

He’s _good._ His face freezes for maybe half a second before he covers his reaction, turning smoothly away to pour water into the back of the coffee maker. His expression is cool when he looks at her again, but she can almost see him running through and discarding possible responses, from _I have no idea what you’re talking about_ to _where did you hear that name?_

“Someone who had it coming,” he says at last, without any expression at all. The coffee maker gurgles in the sudden silence, coming alive as he turns it on. “Someone who pissed me off.” And she recognizes the familiar edge of annoyance. “I suggest you avoid doing the same.”

“Why did Department of Justice want him dead?” She plunges on as he retrieves his mug from the table across the room; her heart is racing, thumping hard in her throat, but she can only lean recklessly forward or run away shrieking and the latter isn’t an option. “What did he do? Did they pay you? Or was it just for the promotion?”

He blinks, coming back to stand at the counter, tilting his head at her; faint surprise gives way to something that’s almost amusement, and the chilling recollection comes to her of a street in San Diego, the casual way he pulled the gun like the cameras meant nothing. She has no proof and he knows it, and the people who paid him are the same ones who should punish crimes like this; the weapon she’s holding isn’t even loaded. He has nothing to fear from her knowledge of this.

He says, mildly, “That’s a fascinating theory.” Turns to watch the carafe filling slowly, and she thinks he’s not looking at an unloaded weapon at all. No, he looks like a man who just watched a bullet go past his ear. A near miss.

She still doesn’t have all the pieces. There’s something else here.

Another text is waiting that night when she checks her phone. This one’s from Burke:

_Got a message for you. From Neal. Tomorrow same place 8 AM._

***

Hale texts her again a few hours later: _Alex is back in town. Looking for something._

She frowns, replies, _looking for what_.

_Same thing she’s been looking for for eight years now._

She stares at the phone, shakes her head and thinks this could never be easy for them.

***

Midnight comes and goes and she’s still awake, though by this time fear is almost eclipsed by frustration. She’s _seen_ Mulvany. But if neither Keller nor Hale recognize him, she can’t think where; between them she thinks they must know everyone she’s ever worked with.

She’s afraid to risk putting Neal on this scent, but she wonders if Mozzie could get into the FBI servers somehow; she’s snatched five or ten minutes on various agents’ unattended laptops before, but it would take a lot more time undisturbed for her to run this guy through the FBI’s entire facial recognition database …

It was a mug shot.

The sudden cold certainty washes over her, and she sits up in bed, staring at the pattern cast on the wall by moonlight through the blinds. She’s seen a mug shot of Mulvany. She can practically see the height markings on the wall behind him now.

One of Fowler’s old case files. She flings the blankets back, grabs her coat and the folder; it won’t take long to check. There aren’t very many of them; the majority are sealed, leaving only the cases from the last year and the police report from -

She stops, frozen, and almost drops the folder. Her hands are shaking, fine tremors shivering up her arms, but her mind is clear and cold and calm, a swift certainty as still and hard as glass.

_Someone who had it coming._

She knows.

She shuts the bedroom door behind her, crosses the living room to where her laptop sits charging on the coffee table; she moves quickly and quietly, but with no attempt at stealth.

Fowler is on the balcony; she can see the glow from his laptop screen, the reflection on the sliding glass door, cracked slightly to allow the cord through. Wind sighs against the outside walls, stirs the Venetian blinds with a soft clatter. The other two agents here tonight - she can’t remember their names - have long since gone to bed.

Fowler’s head moves, turning slightly; he’s heard her. She doesn’t care. She opens her own laptop and inserts the flash drive, crouched on the floor in front of the coffee table and drumming her fingers on the glass top as she waits for it to load.

It’s not a government conspiracy at all. _Sorry, Moz._ This has nothing to do with the government.

She knows who he is.

This is personal.

She clicks open the file. Scrolls quickly past a series of gruesome crime scene photos, past the notes from the investigating officer, until she finds the picture.

It’s him. The security camera photo is less clear, but the features are unmistakably those of this man, captured head on and in profile, height markings and the logo of the DC Metro Police on the wall behind him.

Chief suspect. Prior conviction for armed robbery. Prints at the scene. Arrest warrant still outstanding, whereabouts unknown, never caught.

Except he was. _Beaten severely and his neck was broken in two places._

She closes the laptop. Shrugs into her jacket and crosses to the dining nook, pulling a glass and a bottle of wine at random from the minibar and fumbling for a corkscrew. Moonlight slides in slanted bars across the carpet, growing brighter and fainter as clouds pass, bending over and around the table and the various cases of equipment on the floor. The cork comes out with a pop and she pours a glass of what turns out to be a passably decent red.

Fowler doesn’t even turn as she comes out on the balcony, sliding the door shut behind her. He says, “I hope you’re up because you’ve had some flash of insight about the music box.”

She leans back against the balcony rail and swirls the wine in the glass, takes a slow sip and watches him until he looks up.

“Of course not. You’re still playing amateur conspiracy theorist, trying to figure out why DOJ was after Mulvany.” He sounds worn and exasperated. “We really don’t have time for -”

“DOJ wasn’t after him. You were.” She tosses the photo at him; he catches it by one corner before it falls to the concrete floor. “That’s the guy who killed your wife.”

A truck rumbles through an intersection far below; a sleepy pigeon coos from somewhere under the roof of the neighboring balcony. A warm breeze catches at the photo, drags a cloud in front of the moon, quicksilver bleeding through soaked cotton. Fowler has gone absolutely still.

“What I still don’t understand,” she goes on finally, “is why DOJ spent half a million to cover it up. Who was she to them?”

“Nothing.” He laughs, short and harsh, crumpling the photo in one hand. “Less than nothing.”

“These are the same people who want the music box.” She can feel the pieces sliding into place. “Was that the deal? They get the box, you get him?”

“It started with an anonymous tip.” One shoulder lifts in half a helpless shrug. “Alias he was using and the flight number out of Baltimore.” He sets the computer aside, leans back in his chair with an expression she can’t read; his voice is soft, flat and distant.

“But then how -” That makes no sense; why give him everything he wants before they have anything? 

His eyes on hers are steady, watching her; he inclines his head slightly, go on and a weary, detached curiosity to see if she can put it all together. 

What assurance do they have, now that the guy’s already dead, the police paid off and the evidence …

“They made a copy.” She sets the wineglass on the railing as the last piece falls in with a sharp click. “Before they wiped the tape.” Ten minutes. _Erased, I’d guess, but thoroughly,_ Keller said. “They’ve got you on camera.”

“Aren’t you clever.” The words quiet, edged; he is pinned, here, as surely as she is.

That makes him more dangerous, not less, she knows. Compassion is a luxury she cannot afford.

“So, what?” she asks, when the silence seems about to snap. “They get the box, they make the tape go away?”

He stares at her for a beat, then looks away as his cell phone buzzes.

Lit by the display, his face is transformed by a flash of absolute loathing; a fraction of a second and it’s gone, wiped like it never existed. His voice is tense but controlled as he answers. “Yes, sir.”

She picks up the photo, smooths it flat and tucks it back in the folder. Then she moves past him into the room, lifting the corkscrew from the counter and walking out the door into the hallway.

There’s one elevator bank on this floor; she hooks the corkscrew under the plate around the call buttons, pries it up in a single sharp jerk. Reaching inside, she seizes a handful of wires and yanks, hard, until some half a dozen come loose in a shower of bright sparks, a stinging fall along her wrist.

No one’s getting ahead of her that way. She dashes for the stairs. They’re on the thirtieth floor; she can’t tell if anyone is following or if her footsteps only echo against the narrow walls. She reaches the hallway on the ground floor; he’ll have an agent on watch in the lobby, most likely called him to look for her.

She ducks into the dining room, through the swinging doors into the darkened kitchen, feeling her way toward the back exit; a minute later she’s sprinting past a line of dumpsters, down a narrow alley toward the next street.

It’s not until she’s on the subway, heading east, that she realizes she’s wearing silk pajamas and slippers under her coat.

Ah, well. If Burke is going to request a meeting on such short notice, he can’t expect her to stand on formality. She pulls out her phone and checks the time: 3:15.

Texts Burke: _7 AM rooftop of Marriott near FBI building DON’T BE LATE._


	6. Chapter 6

She watches the sun come up from the roof of a high-rise a few blocks south of the New York FBI offices.

She’s been up here two hours, and she’s mapped five different escape routes from this roof and the next one; the air is harsh and cold, this high, making her eyes water and snapping her hair like a flag.

The roof is mostly flat, rough concrete scraped by the wind, but it holds a commanding view of anyone approaching; it’s also due east of the roof exit for the Marriott next door. She’ll see Burke before he can see her, in the shadow of a low wall and backed by the rising sun.

She wants to pace, bleed off tension and warm up at the same time, but she’s found the only sheltered spot out of the wind where she can watch for him. A family of small brown birds has found it, too; she can hear peeping from the nest a few yards away, near the air conditioning vent, when the wind dies down. If she moves too much or too suddenly the parents start to dive at her head, threatening to give away her position.

She waits until she sees Burke step out onto the roof next door, propping the door behind him, before she pulls out her phone. 6:58 AM.

Fowler picks up on the second ring. “If this is who I think it is, you’d better be on your way back here.”

She waits just long enough that he might start to wonder if it’s someone else, then says, “Good morning to you, too.”

Another beat of silence; she imagines him ordering a trace, possibly clearing the room or moving onto the balcony. “Where are you?”

“I’m sure you’ll know soon enough.” She watches Burke, alert and pacing on the next roof, and keeps her voice quiet. “If your people are still following Burke, you’ll know he’s about a hundred yards away from me.”

“Is there some reason I should care about that?”

“Maybe.” She takes a deep breath, dragging her fingers through wind-snarled hair. She has a better hand now than she’s had yet, in all this, and she has to play it carefully. “Neal doesn’t have the music box.”

Fowler’s voice is soft and dangerous. “If this is your idea of a joke -”

“He never did.” Burke has stopped pacing and retreated into the shadow of the roof exit, cautious, checking his watch. She hardly expects protection from him, but his presence is leverage she can use. It’s a delicate balancing act, up here; the trick is to not look down.

“I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing,” Fowler says, and his tone drops the temperature further before she cuts him off.

“It’s in New York.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. But I have reason to believe it’s in the city.” The rising sun blazes red and gold in a tide of fire washing up wide panes of mirrored glass below her; to the west, behind Burke, grey twilight lifts and fades into pale, hazy blue. The wind sings past an antenna near the roof’s edge. “If we can figure out where it is, we can get it for you.”

Silence. Finally, he snaps, “How?”

“He’s Neal freaking Caffrey.” She allows an impatient edge to creep into her voice. “How do you think?”

“How do we figure out where it is?”

“With our combined talents and resources I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”

“We’d better,” he says. “I don’t know where you are and I don’t care, but I want you back here in thirty minutes. And you’re going to tell me what you know, and why you think it’s here, and how we’re going to find it. And if I don’t get the damn thing -”

“If you don’t get it,” she interrupts calmly, “you have a problem.”

“Believe me,” and it’s almost a whisper, “I won’t be the only one. You have two choices here. Option one, I get the music box and we never have to see each other again. You and Caffrey get to finish out his next three and a half years in a million-dollar loft in downtown Manhattan.” Burke isn’t moving; for half a second she’s afraid he’s left, but he’s only standing still in the shadow of the door. “Or you can take the bus down to Sing Sing once a week for the next twenty-five years. I suggest you think very carefully about your next move.”

“Oh, I have.” She covers the phone and lets out a slow, shaky breath before continuing. “And Neal’s not doing three and a half more years, in Manhattan or anywhere else. We get you the music box and he’s done, Fowler. He goes free.”

His voice is arctic. “I don’t think you’re in a position to make demands, here.”

“I’m in a much better position than I was six hours ago and you know it.” She looks up; Burke has seen her. But he can’t hear her at this distance. She holds up a hand and waves. “Agent Burke is getting impatient; we’re supposed to be meeting at seven.”

The words are flat, expressionless. “Is that so.”

“This meeting was his idea. I don’t know what he wants and I don’t care. But I know what he’s going to get if you and I can’t come to an arrangement in the next, oh, five minutes.”

“Your position hasn’t improved nearly as much as you think,” he says at last. “I don’t know what you think you have, but it’s all well outside Burke’s jurisdiction. And if you had anything like proof you’d have said so before now.”

“I don’t need proof.” Now Burke moves toward the roof’s edge, arms spread in a _now what?_ gesture. “You know Burke as well as I do. If I put him on this scent he’ll keep digging until he finds some.”

A long pause; her mouth is too dry to swallow. _Don’t look down._

Then he says, “I don’t know what kind of pull you think I have with DOJ, but I can’t get his sentence overturned.”

She’s got him.

“Then you’re going to help him escape.” She takes a deep breath, heart racing. “Clean IDs for both of us and safe passage out of the country. That’s my price.”

“You’re telling me you and Caffrey can’t forge your own passports?”

“I want deep-cover, permanent new identities.” She hears Burke yell something, the words torn away by the wind, and she holds up a hand, _give me a minute, here._ “Witness protection quality, with a background and a paper trail. We get you the music box and we disappear, away from the feds and whoever the hell you’re working for.”

“Why would I do that?”

And now to close it.

“Because you want this to be over as much as I do.” This much she knows; she’s watched his face while he’s on the phone enough times to be sure of it. “Because I am not asking for that much. Two clean passports and a plane. You can make this happen.” Her voice drops. “And you know this will be over a lot faster if you give me a reason to work with you and not against you. I might not have enough to take you down, but I can make your life very difficult.”

“You’ve already made my life difficult.”

“It’s a skill. I practice.” She pauses. “And believe me, I’m just getting started.” She pushes herself to her feet, ducking as the pair of birds swoop just above her hair in tight formation. “Now do we have a deal?”

Another pause. She can count her heartbeats, count Burke’s steps as he paces impatiently; the seconds stretch, taut and waiting.

Finally, he says, “If you screw me on this -”

She snaps, “Likewise.”

***

She counts six slow steps away from the roof edge before she turns, eyes down to avoid looking into the sun; enough for a running start. 

She sees Burke start, looking up to see her running toward him; it’s a far enough leap to the roof next door to look daunting, but not far enough to be dangerous. Much. She thinks. But in this game hesitation will be fatal.

She imagines she is one of those sharks that has to keep swimming or it will drown.

Burke yells something as she jumps, words dropping into the silence of the long drop below.

She can handle him. Blood pounds in her ears, triumph singing like a fine razor. She can handle Fowler. And they’re all going to regret the day they backed her into a corner.

She lands on a sliding scree of broken concrete, flings her arms out for balance and barely avoids landing flat on her ass at his feet. Burke is staring at her, with an expression somewhere between relief and exasperation and annoyance. Finally he shakes his head, with a muttered, “Unbelievable.”

And okay, it’s not falling four stories into a bakery awning, but it’s a start. 

She steps back, puts the roof edge on her left side and Burke some six feet in front of her, still breathing hard; exhilaration is tempered by the knowledge that only reckless momentum is keeping all of this from falling apart. She’s casual about moving so she’s closer to the door than he is, but she’s pretty sure he notices.

“You’re looking informal this morning.”

She glances down at the lavender silk pajamas under her coat, her light slippers. “I had to leave in a hurry.” She shrugs, hands out in a “you got me” gesture. “You said you have a message.”

“I do.” His eyes fix on her face, but he doesn’t try to move toward her. “Neal says ‘tell her I’m starting to wonder if the bottle really did mean goodbye’.”

She pivots sharply away from him to stare at the door, half-propped with a broken brick; she doesn’t trust her face to stay blank under his scrutiny. She hears Mozzie’s voice, _Neal doesn’t know what to think,_ and the brief flash of triumph fades and deflates like a squashed balloon. She’s back, all of a sudden, in that little visiting room where it all fell apart and all she can see are Neal’s eyes, uncomprehending, stunned and lost.

 _Damn_ Fowler and his stupid music box, anyway.

“Let it be goodbye,” Burke is saying behind her. The words are quiet, almost gentle. “This music box, whatever it is - I don’t think Neal has it.”

“He doesn’t.” Because nothing could ever be easy for them. She’s won her first step forward in nearly a year but there is so much further to go and she wants this to be _done._ She’s worn out with being afraid for both of them and she doesn’t want to do this anymore.

“I don’t know what’s so special about this thing, but Neal can’t get it for you. It’s time to let him move on.”

As if the words “move on” had ever meant anything to Neal. But she can’t say that; she needs a way to get him a message. One Burke can’t translate. She wishes, fiercely, that she could be sure Neal won’t translate it for him.

“Tell him ‘see Robert’,” she says. Short, simple, and not open to misinterpretation; a location for a message drop. Now she just has to figure out what message to leave there.

Burke frowns, suspicious. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’ll know.” She turns back to face him, attempts to smooth her face blank. “If he has any sense he won’t tell you, but I’m not counting on that.”

“You think he can steal the box.” He takes a step forward, then stops when she freezes.

“Do you think he can’t?” she asks, lightly, challenging. Surely he knows better than to underestimate Neal.

“You -” He draws a deep breath, blows it out sharply, half turning away. “Look, he has a chance at something good, here. He’s got a real shot at turning his life around. Probably the last shot he’s going to get, and I’m not about to let him blow it over -” he waves an angry hand at the air between them “- whatever the hell it is you and Fowler are trying to pull here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Look, Kate -” He scrubs a hand over his face, pinches the bridge of his nose, looking tired. “If you ever did love him - please don’t screw this up for him. He’s got a lot going for him, right now. He’s got work he enjoys and a chance to help people. He’s got people who care about him.”

“Everything except freedom.” And how do you put a price on that?

“He’d be free right now if he hadn’t escaped last year. What’s in that damn box, anyway, that you couldn’t wait until he was released?” He’s angry, now. “You’re the one he broke out to chase after.”

And that’s too much. Mozzie has a right to say that to her. Burke does not. “I’m not the one who put him back inside.”

“If he steals that thing he’s going away for twenty-five years. You have to know that.”

“Only if you catch him.” But she knows by the way he sighs, sharp and harsh, that he won’t be bought off. She hears Fowler, again, saying Burke’s a Boy Scout; he thinks he’s going to reform Caffrey.

“We both know he’ll do this if you ask him.” He spreads his hands, angry and exasperated and helpless. “I’m asking you not to.” His voice softens. “He has a life, here.”

“It’s going to be a short life if he stays here much longer.” She lets out a slow breath, forcing her face to remain calm. 

She knows whoever is pulling the strings here isn’t afraid to kill; whoever is behind all this set up Mulvany to be killed. She wouldn’t be surprised if Fowler’s wife’s death was a paid hit to set him up as well; like Kate, she was nothing to them. _Less than nothing._

Only a pawn, used to set a trap for the man she loved.

His voice drops, dangerous. “Are you threatening him?”

“I’m not the one making threats, Burke.” Her voice stays cold, but it’s edged in a way she can’t hide.

“I don’t know what kind of game you and Fowler are playing, here, but anyone who tries to hurt Neal will regret it.”

“This goes so much higher than Fowler.” She forces her voice to remain cold. She can’t let Burke or anyone else see she’s terrified for Neal. “You know Neal. He hates guns. He doesn’t know how to fight. He knows how to run and how to hide, and he can’t do either as long as he’s got that damn thing around his ankle. You’d better hope you can protect him, because you’ve taken away every means he has of protecting himself.”

“I don’t understand you.” His voice is quiet but fierce. “What is it you want, anyway? If you mean to hurt him, you should know you’ll regret it. If you’re in some kind of trouble, you need to tell me, and I can help. Neal can’t help you. You need to let him go.”

She laughs, high and sharp and wild, before she can stop herself; the echoes bounce off the surrounding buildings before the wind rips them. “It was a fed got me into this mess,” she says. “You think I’d trust another one to get me out? You people have given me nothing but grief since long before I started breaking the law.”

His face moves through annoyance, frustration, and anger, before settling into contempt. “You like nice things,” he says. “What, are those real silk?” Waving at her outfit. “Neal has a way of acquiring a lot of things, and you think he can get you this one. Maybe you really did care about him once, maybe not. But he still has feelings for you, and you think you can use that.” He takes a step toward her, and she doesn’t back away. “I’m not going to watch you use those feelings to manipulate him into something that will ruin his best shot at -”

“ _I_ used -” she breaks in, and stops, staring. And she can _feel_ something snap, like a physical release somewhere behind her ribcage, like something breaking. She steps toward him, stops when she’s suddenly not sure she won’t shove him off the edge.

“You used me.” The words are quiet, deliberate, precise. She clenches her hands into fists, holds them behind her back. “You used his feelings for me to draw him into a trap. And then you shut him in a cage for four years. Now you’re holding him on a two-mile leash and you have the nerve -” Her voice rises. “- you have the _absolute fucking nerve_ -” And she thinks she might be shouting, now; she can’t tell through the grey rushing sound in her ears. “- to come to me and tell _me_ ‘let him go’.”

Burke blinks, startled, but doesn’t step back.

“You asked me what I wanted.” She steps forward, the next words are a low hiss. “I want the last four and a half years of our lives back. Can you get that for me?”

Lost paintings, she thinks, can be found again, or copied; the right kind of oven can make a diamond; you can always get more money. Those four and a half years can never be recovered or replaced; time, once lost, is gone forever.

“You say he’s your friend,” she continues, when she can breathe normally, “If that’s true then take that damn thing off his ankle.”

His face hardens. “So he can steal your music box for you?”

“I don’t give a damn what you think of me.” She leans in close. “But you need to understand something about Neal. He doesn’t belong in a cage. He doesn’t belong on a leash. He’s not your child and he’s not your pet.”

“He’s on that anklet for a reason -”

“He can be your prisoner,” she breaks in, overriding him, “or he can be your friend. He can’t be both.” And she’s not sure why she bothers; her words aren’t sinking in. “If you do care about him, _you_ need to let him go.”

***

“Alexandra Hunter,” she says, walking in to find Fowler and five other agents camped out in the living room. Someone has found a card table, finally, and some folding chairs. Fowler is at the breakfast bar with a stack of files; he looks up when she comes in.

She drops her coat in the bedroom and decides coffee is a higher priority than getting dressed; she’s been up all night and it’s only 9 AM and it’s been a long day already. Thanks to these people she lives here, and if they can’t deal with her wandering around in pajamas that’s their problem.

“I hope I didn’t miss breakfast.” She leans over Fowler’s shoulder to peer at the file.

He shuts it with a snap, tilting his head toward a tray on the counter; she grabs half a bagel and pours what’s left in the coffee pot into a mug. She can practically see him running through a long list of things he’d like to say, threats he’d like to make, before deciding none are likely to be useful right now.

Finally, he says, “Who’s Hunter?”

“Old associate of Neal’s.” She perches on a stool, hooking her feet through the rungs.

“By associate you mean ex?”

“I mean his partner when he went after the music box the last time,” she says, refusing to be baited. “She’s in New York, and she’s been on the trail of this thing a lot longer than you have. If she’s here, she thinks the box is here. And she’s probably right. We follow her, that’s our best chance of turning up a lead.”

Or she could tell Neal to follow her; Alex would be more likely to speak to Neal than to Kate or any FBI agent, though she’s unclear how much trust still exists between them. She tears a sheet off of Fowler’s yellow legal pad, idly folding without looking at it.

The coffee is already cold, but it’s caffeine.

“How was your meeting with Burke?”

“Less interesting than it could have been,” she says quietly, with a brief but pointed glance. 

He says, in the same tone, “This Hunter had better not be another dead end.”

“She’s not.” She takes another slow sip of coffee and gives him a look over the rim of the mug. “You were right about Burke. He’s a Boy Scout.”

“Infuriating, isn’t he?”

“Don’t even get me started.”

***

There’s a flower vendor in the park near where she and Neal used to go walking. She buys a tasteful arrangement; large enough to show respect without being showy or extravagant, tied with a thick ribbon. They have a delicate scent, the sort you’d stick your nose in to fully appreciate, and then see the yellow paper flower tucked in among them.

The real ones are for her father; the paper, carefully folded by hand, is for Neal.

She hears her own voice - _you couldn’t just say “let’s go to Copenhagen for this opportunity Alex told me about”._ She hears Mozzie - _if you’d just tell him what you’re doing._ She folds it slowly; she doesn’t need to write anything inside. It’s a signal and an apology at once, and she hopes he’ll read the other message in it. _I get it now, I hope you will, too; I hope you’ll forgive me; love is about more than honesty._

It’s nearly noon when she arrives at the cemetery. The sun is high; she can see a party of mourners following a gleaming black hearse somewhere on the other side. She moves in the other direction, gold and orange leaves crunching beneath her feet on the gravel path.

She’d come here once, with Neal; it had been just before they left New York to head up to Philadelphia for a few months; they hadn’t known, at the time, when or if they’d be coming back to New York, and she’d had this idea she should say goodbye. She’d had some idea about closure, or forgiveness, and she’d told Neal “let’s go” without saying where.

She’d thought it would help, to say goodbye without anger. But she was still angry, standing there with the wind on the hill whipped in scarf; she could feel it like a tight knot, a hot stone lodged somewhere just behind her ribs, rage banked and held tensely in check.

They hadn’t touched or spoken on the way there; as she turned to walk away, her steps quick and furious, Neal caught her hand in both of his and held on; when they got on the subway he wrapped his arms around her and held her until she finally let herself lean into him, until she could finally start to relax.

They say things about closure, about confronting your feelings, about forgiveness; they say a lot of crap, Kate thinks.

She’s always pictured her mother on some organic farm outside San Francisco, wearing beads and a skirt; that was her father’s image. Now she wonders if her mother made a fortune as a forger and retired to some island somewhere. She decides she likes that image better.

She’s not angry anymore, but she’s pretty sure this isn’t forgiveness.

She stands under the wide, empty sky and looks at the field of grey polished granite and colorful, quiet, tasteful bouquets like her own and feels - nothing. Only the memory, coming unexpected, of Neal beside her gripping her hand.

Michael said, the one time she brought it up, that anger fades and eventually you remember why you loved the person. She remembers none of that. There is no warmth, no sorrow, no peace where that hard fist of rage beneath her ribs used to be - only a burned-out hole where nothing will grow.

“I won’t be coming back,” she says, and she knows some people find peace, talking to headstones, but she just feels like she’s talking to herself. “I’m fleeing the country. I’m going to be a wanted fugitive. With my boyfriend. Not the one you met; this is a different one. He’s an art thief.”

And there’s not even a flicker of bitter amusement at the thought of his reaction. She thinks that should worry her more than it does.

Thin voices rise, singing, from somewhere across the green. “I found a way to make a living as an artist,” she says, finally, but the satisfaction she’d expected to feel, saying this to him, is a shadow of a memory, a reflection in water shattered by the impact of all that’s come since. “It’s easy, all you have to do is not care about breaking the law.”

She’s trying to feel _something,_ but there’s nothing there, not contempt or defiance or regret. She wants Neal beside her, holding her hand. She wants him to tell her there isn’t something terribly wrong with her, now. 

She wonders if this is temporary, if it’s some kind of long-delayed cumulative stress reaction, an overload of fear and anger and frustration and loneliness built up over the last year, the last four years, leaving her unable to have any real emotional response that isn’t tied into her own and Neal’s current peril.

Maybe time and distance fade love as well as anger. Or perhaps she simply isn’t the same person who loved Robert Moreau once and held on so tightly to rage and grief together at his controlling nature and his secrets. Maybe she has changed so much she has nothing in common with that girl.

Neal loved that girl. She wonders if he will love the person she’s becoming now.

The bells ring out twelve noon, and continue caroling a rippling melody, some old hymn half-remembered. She sets the flowers gently on the grass with a whispered, “Goodbye.”

***

“Hunter’s been trying to get a meeting with this man,” Fowler tells her, barely a week later, throwing a file on the coffee table. “He won’t go near her, but she thinks he knows something.”

“Can we get to him?” she asks.

“He’ll be at a party at the Argentinian mission to the UN in two days. He’ll talk for the right price, but only there, and he’s on his way out of the country three days after that. We need to move fast.”

“Can we get inside?”

“He sent over invitations to the reception. Says we’ll need to be inconspicuous.”

“ _I_ can do inconspicuous.” She stares at Fowler until he raises both eyebrows at her, wary and curious. “You look like a fed.”

“Only to an experienced criminal.”

“You flatter me.”

She buys a new dress for the reception and charges it to Fowler’s FBI expense account because she can. Their contact is spooked; he’s being given shelter inside the Argentinian mission, hiding out in preparation for fleeing the country. Who he’s looking to escape from is unclear.

The hall is lit by a giant chandelier at the center of the room, a glittering confection of glass and tiny lightbulbs that casts a wide circular glow around the long hall, leaving the edges and the corners crowded thick with shadows.

Far corner by the bar, their contact had said; the corner nearest the door is darker and less crowded, but the man, with a thin, pinched face and a sharp nose, had opted to risk increased exposure by the busy bar table to be near a steady supply of alcohol to calm his obviously unsteady nerves.

“You’re young,” is the first thing he says to her, and he’s obviously drunk, leaning in to touch her arm, his eyes meeting hers briefly before darting from one end of the bar to the other, restless, tense and fearful. “And beautiful. This thing you’re after –“ he leans closed, and his breath stinks of gin, “- people have died for it already. It isn’t worth it. Go home and forget you ever heard of it.”

She could fend him off easily herself, and does, but she thinks it might lend credence to their cover if her escort bothered to do something about the little man pawing drunkenly at her arm and leaning into her space, a gin-soaked Cassandra in a bowtie and an ill-fitting suit, instead of looming a step behind her looking faintly amused by the whole thing.

“I’m afraid I don’t really have a choice,” she says, prying his hand loose; he seizes hers in both of his.

“You know, I used to think it would be romantic to die for a song.”

She leans in toward him with a finger to her lips. “Shhh. Just tell me where it is, and then you can get out of here and let us worry about ourselves, okay?”

He shrinks away from the table toward the wall, drawing her with him. “What you’re looking for was picked up by Edward Reilly last December.”

That name is familiar; she sees a flicker of recognition in Fowler’s eyes, too. “Who did he deliver it to?”

He shakes his head quickly. “No idea. Reilly keeps all his appointments on his laptop. That’s all I know. These people are _dangerous._ ”

“Oh, I know Reilly’s dangerous.”She exchanges a look with Fowler. This couldn’t be easy. A phone she could lift on the street; for the laptop they’ll probably have to break into his house.

“Ha!” He waves a hand and almost knocks over a tray of champagne flutes; glass rattles a high warning. “Reilly’s just a courier. He’s not the one you need to be afraid of.”

A courier who likes to chop off his enemies’ hands for amusement, she thinks. She glances at Fowler briefly and when she looks back the little man is moving along the wall toward the door.

Another man turns from the table; she almost imagines he’s watching their contact disappear into the crowd, a moment before he says, “If it isn’t Kate Moreau.”

She’s not sure what expression shows on her face, but whatever it is has Fowler’s right hand reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

“Adler.”

It’s him, all right. He’s gone a little grey at the temples but otherwise he looks thoroughly pleased with himself, in a silk suit with the old smile that manages to be distant and patronizing all at once. 

“Argentina agrees with you.”

“Lovely place,” he says. “You should think about a visit.”

“I can think of few people I’d like to visit less,” she says, and it’s a flat, cold rage.

“You’re in a bad position here, Kate.” His voice drops. “I might be able to help you.”

She grabs a champagne flute from the tray and gulps about half of it at once, leaning close and hissing, “What would you know about my position?”

He smiles in faint amusement. “I know the man you’re with –“ he tilts his head at Fowler, watching all of this and looking suspicious, “- is bad news.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that.” She laughs sharply, stilling abruptly as a few heads turn towards them.

Fowler steps up beside her, clearly aware that he’s missing something and annoyed by that. “Have we met?”

“No, I don’t believe so.” Adler offers a thin smile. “But your reputation precedes you, Agent Fowler.”

“Really.” Fowler’s eyes have gone flat and hard.

“Lucky for _you_ he doesn’t have the authority to make an arrest in here,” Kate whispers, low and furious. And then, to Fowler, “I think we’ve learned all we can, here.”

They _are_ trying to be inconspicuous, and if she punches Adler in the face it will make a scene.

She’s a skilled enough pickpocket to notice when someone tries to lift something from her; she watches Adler’s hand slip into the pocket of her coat as he turns away.

Walking away past the wrought-iron gates of the mission, she pulls out a business card stamped with a phone number. Written on the back, in Adler’s familiar hand, _if you decide you want my help._

“You want to explain that?” Fowler demands.

“It’s a shame your badge doesn’t mean anything in there.” She nods back at the gates. “You could have made your entire career, bringing him in.”

“I didn’t recognize him.”

“You never worked White Collar.” She forces her voice to stay level, her hands clenching beside her. “That’s Vincent Adler.”

***

“Do we know where Reilly is?” she asks, once they’re back at the hotel.

“He’s got a house in Alexandria, Virginia.” Another agent answers. “He’s been staying there the past few days.”

“Is he traveling anywhere any time soon?” she asks. A hotel room would be easier to get into than his house, most likely, and he’d take his laptop with him on business.

“No trips booked under any known alias.” The agent looks up. “How soon can we get a warrant?”

“Based on what?” Fowler snaps.

“Don’t we have a judge who can -?”

“Not anymore.” He stalks over to the balcony doors, stares out at the skyline.

“You have a forger who can make you a decent copy,” Kate says, raising her hand and her eyebrows at them.

Fowler shakes his head. “Reilly’s a professional. He’ll know we’ve got nothing on him; he’ll call the judge to confirm it’s real.”

“So pick a judge who’s out of town this week. The warrant’s a distraction, anyway.” She leans over his shoulder. “What’s the security like at his house?” Fowler looks at her. “You knock on the door, show him the warrant, wave your badge around and make a big noise. I go in through the upstairs window while everyone’s watching you; by the time he gets ahold of the judge and realizes the warrant’s fake, we already have what we need.”

“It’s a big house. You really think you can find it quickly?”

“They’ll be running around in a panic trying to hide anything they don’t want you to see. Can we tap into the security cameras?”

“We get into the camera feed, we can watch from the van and see where they hide the laptop,” another agent says.

Fowler gives her a sharp look. “You can make a copy of the hard drive and get out before anyone sees you?”

“Tell me where it is and give me something that’ll break through his passwords and I’ve got it.”

***

Sometime later, while Maurice and the younger agents are doing something complicated involving computers and code-breaking, Fowler motions her over to the breakfast bar. 

“What’s up?”

“You know who Edward Reilly is.” It’s not a question.

“The name rings a bell,” she says. Everyone on either side of this line of work knows who Reilly is. Fowler has a file in his hand; he slides it across the bar at her. “What’s this?”

“Motivation,” he says, with a thin smile. “Did you know your boy stole a ten million from Reilly last week?”

She blinks, and something in her throat tightens. “The hell are you talking about?”

“It’s all in here.” He taps one finger against the file.

“Is this another one of your frame jobs?” she demands, looking up with a stare like a knife. “’Cause I’m not about to –“

“This isn’t me.” His voice is quiet and serious, the mocking glint gone from his eyes. “You’re familiar with Ryan Wilkes, I’m sure.”

“You’ve read my file.”

“And you’ve clearly read mine.” He sits on a stool across from her. “Wilkes was recently arrested for kidnapping,” he goes on. “Sixteen year old girl, her father owns Atlantic Incorporated, which I’m sure you’re also familiar with, but Wilkes wasn’t after his money.”

Kate isn’t sure where this is going, but she’s sure she’s not going to like it. “What was he after?”

“He wanted to steal ten million dollars from Reilly. But not being suicidal, he wanted Caffrey as a front man. Said he’d let the girl go in exchange for your boy.”

She sits abruptly on a stool, her mouth suddenly dry. “Neal turned himself over to Wilkes in exchange for this girl.”

It’s just the sort of thing Neal would do. Wilkes is unfinished business for him; he has always felt responsible for Wilkes’ plans, ever since that disastrous job, and if Wilkes had kidnapped this girl precisely to get him to cooperate, he’d had felt he had to go along with whatever Wilkes demanded in return for her safety. Even if he must have known Wilkes wouldn’t let the girl go when he said he would.

She realizes she’s half crumpled the edge of the file in her fist; she lets out a slow breath and forces her fingers to relax.

“Kate.” When she looks up, Fowler’s eyes are steady and serious, watching her face; his next words are soft and level. “I never said he turned himself over.”

The air is suddenly thick and stifling and the cover of the file under her hands feels somehow unreal; she thinks her fingers have gone numb. Her voice is oddly calm and steady, but somehow distant; she might be listening to a stranger’s words, far away and distorted, coming to her through fog or water.

“Burke gave Neal to Ryan Wilkes for some banker’s daughter.”

She’s back there again, in the car after she and Mozzie rescued him from Wilkes the last time; she’s holding his head on the back seat, trying to stroke his hair back from his flushed face and steady the IV line at the same time, trying to keep his hands still while he fights her, trying to pull it out. Then she blinks and she can see Burke, only briefly, before his face is gone in a flash of red; for an instant she can see herself pushing him off that roof.

“Burke wasn’t the lead agent on this case.” The fog retreats and she can see Fowler’s face again; his expression hasn’t changed, but for a split second she thinks he knows exactly what’s going through her mind. “But obviously he couldn’t – or didn’t – prevent it from happening.”

He looks at her for a moment before pulling out his phone; he touches the display and slides it across the bar toward her. “He’s fine. Recovered three days ago. He’s back at his apartment.”

The phone display is pulled up to Neal’s tracking data; she can see the green dot on Riverside Drive. She stares at it for a few seconds before she looks up.

“Who was the lead agent?”

“It’s all in the file.” He picks up the phone again and pockets it. “I had nothing to do with this. Just in case you’re thinking whatever leverage you have against me is enough to protect him. In case you’re sending us on another dead end trip. I am not the only threat facing Caffrey right now.” He leans forward as she opens the file. “He’s not working at a desk and sipping expensive coffee all day in White Collar. They’ve got him in the field, unarmed, facing guys like Wilkes and Reilly. And as you can see, their concern for his safety is – limited.”

“Kimberly Rice.” She will remember that name. She will remember the face staring up at her from the file photo, red hair in curls swept back from her forehead. She looks up and meets Fowler’s eyes steadily; she wonders for the first time what she might be capable of, if pushed far enough.

“There’s a Learjet in a hangar at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina,” he says. “I’ve got a contact at an airstrip in Newfoundland where you can refuel with no questions asked, and from there you’ll make it all the way to Ireland. As soon as I have the music box it’s yours, and you can get him out of there to someplace safe. But for his sake I strongly suggest you don’t try to waste any more time.”

“It says here Rice is up for a disciplinary hearing.”

“Not my case.”

“Could it be your case?”

“The hearing’s this Friday.” He waves a hand at the room, the files spread across every flat surface, the surveillance equipment covering the floor, as if to say _clearly I am working on other things._ But he pauses, with a measuring look. “If I get the music box before then I’ll find a way to take the case and string her up by her thumbs for you.”

The chances they’ll be able to find and steal the music box in two days are close to none. Still, she allows herself a cold smile. “Now that’s what I call motivation.”

***

Two hours before the scheduled raid, Maurice tells them their contact from the mission is dead.

Kate wraps her hair in tight braids around her head; there’s no time, now, to wonder what this might mean. She pulls on sensible boots; a black sweatshirt and black pants complete the cat burglar outfit; she tugs on thin leather gloves in the van. Maurice hands her a flash drive on a thin cord.

“This will break the security on the laptop and make the copy; all you have to do is find it and then get out without being seen.”

“That’s what I do,” she says, slipping the cord around her neck and tucking the drive under her shirt. Except normally she has Neal or Mozzie on lookout backing her up. _You don’t pull the con with the partner you want,_ she hears Mozzie’s voice in her head. _You pull the con with the partner you’ve got._ Fowler hands her an earpiece and a watch with a radio transmitter without speaking; she taps the watch, hears her own voice on the van’s speakers: “Is this thing on?”

Theoretically, once they get into the security camera feed they should be able to mask her approach, but she’s not taking any chances. She stays in the shadows by the hedges until she’s under the nearest window, waits to hear voices at the front door.

She’s not waiting long. “FBI! Open up!” Lights come on upstairs; she pulls the grappling hook off her belt and coils the rope around her hand, testing the weight of it. She hears Fowler’s voice, a slow drawl over the radio: “We have a warrant to search the house. Now are you going to put the guns down and get out of our way?”

Then Maurice, from the van: “Yeah, they’re scared, all right.” An owl hoots slowly in the woods behind the house. The rustling of trees blends with the static on the radio. “I got four different guys running upstairs and hiding stuff. Don’t see a laptop yet.”

Kate raises the binoculars, examining each of the fourth floor windows; none looks any easier to open than the others, and she shifts the view down to the third floor. Tapping the watch, she says quietly, “Ready when you are.”

She wonders if this is how Neal feels, before he goes in on an undercover FBI op. She misses his voice on the radio, misses the familiar twenty-year-old Russian surplus gear Mozzie finds for them; does he have the same creeping hesitation, getting ready to go into danger with no one but a team of feds to watch his back?

The breeze pulls the clouds along, as shifting shadows play across the grass, darkness giving way to moon-silvered dew. She holds herself still and wraps her arms around her chest, hands tucked into her armpits for warmth, trying not to shiver. The trees have bled dry of color in the dark, solidifying as the night deepens into a solid wall of black against the silver-and-charcoal sky. She moves carefully to try to get out of the wind; shivering will make this harder.

“Got a guard hiding a laptop in a chest at the end of a bed; looks like the thing has a false floor.” Maurice again. “It’s in a bedroom, looks like the far end of the hall. There’s a vanity table with a mirror; judging by the reflection, the window looks out the back.”

She touches the watch again. “Which floor?”

“Looks like the fourth.”

“Looks like?” she mimics sourly, spinning the grappling hook around her hand, experimental. She breathes out slowly, draws her arm back and watches the hook come down to land on the window ledge; a light pull and she feels it catch. She might be out of practice, but she’s still got it. “And here goes,” she whispers, mostly to herself, as she hauls herself up to the narrow ledge. The moon comes out from the clouds then, outlines her clearly against the frame and casts a glare on the glass so she can’t see inside; she has no idea if anyone is inside, but if they are they can see her. She can hardly see the ground; the hedge is only a faint grey line in a sea of soft darkness below. She can see the wire running up the glass, ready to set off the security system if the window moves. Crouching on the ledge, she leans against the glass, speaks softly into her wrist. “Okay, I’m gonna need an alarm, here.”

She breathes slowly, her eyes focused on the lower edge of the window frame as she pulls a knife from her belt; it seems like a long wait, as her legs start to cramp and she fights the urge to shift to a more comfortable position. The ledge is narrow and smooth, and it’s a long way down. Finally she hears Fowler say, “Come on, people, I haven’t got all night here.”

That’s the signal. “All right, alarm in three, two, one -” She jams the knife under the frame and wrenches it sharply upward; the window moves, opening several inches with that first push, and she grabs the edge of the frame to keep from falling backward as a loud electronic shriek bursts into the night.

Through it she hears Fowler in her ear: “Was I not supposed to touch that?”

She shoves the window the rest of the way up, ducks under and inside the room and presses herself flat against the wall; it’s too dark to see clearly and she can’t hear anything over the alarm.

The end of the cord from the blinds makes a faint tapping sound against the sill, in time with the breeze, making the skin crawl at the back of her neck. She hears a loud thump somewhere downstairs; she moves toward the door, peering into a dimly lit hallway.

“Where am I going, guys?” She waves impatiently at the security camera outside the door.

Maurice says, “Two doors down on your left.” A pause.“No, three.”

She sighs, wishing desperately for Mozzie and his Russian surplus spy cam and his voice in her ear providing commentary on the mark’s taste in interior decorations.

She finds the room, eases the door open; once her eyes have adjusted she can see the dark shape of the chest at the end of the bed. The laptop isn’t plugged in, but the screen hums to life, casting a blue glow across the thick carpet. She pulls the flashdrive over her head, tugs the cap off with her teeth and shoves it into the slot.

“Waiting for the password,” she murmurs into her watch.

Mozzie would have something to say, she knows, about the turquoise and fuschia pattern on the carpet. She flexes her fingers impatiently, staring at the darkened doorway so the light from the screen won’t blind her. The graphic on the screen changes; whatever program is on that flash drive has broken through the security; a green progress bar crawls slowly across the screen as it makes a copy of the files.

It’s done, the drive capped and tucked out of sight under her shirt, when she sees a light come on at the end of the hall.

She shuts the laptop quickly and stows it out of sight. “Done,” she says into her wrist. “On my way out.”

The light comes on and she can’t see; she makes a lunge for the window and trips on something; a chair falls to the carpet with a soft thud. A hand locks around her throat and flings her into the wall. “Who the hell are you?”

Maurice snaps something over the radio, but it’s lost in white noise inside her head and she can’t breathe, can’t make any answer. Her eyes are still dazzled by the light and her attacker is standing too close for her to kick him, his weight pressing her into the wall and both hands wrapped around her neck. She can’t breathe, can’t speak, can’t scream; she thinks _dammit Moz some backup would be nice_ but Moz isn’t here. Neal isn’t here.

She hears a voice in her ear, faintly, above the harsh, choked sounds as she struggles for air – can they see this through the cameras, from the van? But if they can they’re too far away and the edges of her vision are grey, a sparkling fog creeping across her eyes. She shoves uselessly at him with one hand. Then her right hand finds the knife at her belt; she hears someone shout as she brings it up in a blind sweep, feels resistance as something warm sprays across her face and neck.

A shadow looms behind him and Fowler is there, seizing the back of the man’s collar with one hand and flinging him halfway across the room to slump against the chest.

She and Fowler stare at each other for a brief, frozen moment before she gasps in air and sags against the wall, coughing.

“We need to go,” Fowler snaps; she holds up a hand as he steps toward her.

“I’m good,” she says, touching the hard plastic lump of the flashdrive under her shirt. The cord didn’t break in the struggle, at least. Good might be overstating things a little; her face and her sleeve are wet; she can’t see the face of the man crumpled against the chest, but blood runs down the side of his neck where her knife sticks out and he’s not moving.

She ducks past Fowler into the hallway, now brightly lit by lamps at both ends. She hears Fowler’s voice, raised, behind her; he blocks the hallway, barking imperiously as more of Reilly’s hired thugs run up the stairs, long enough for her to find the darkened room where she entered and slip out the open window.

The rope slides through her hands, too fast, and she’s grateful for the gloves; she lands hard in a crouch and spares only a second to recover before springing for the street, weaving slightly and breathing hard; cool air scrapes at the back of her throat; she can’t seem to get enough, still, and she chokes back another coughing fit and nearly runs into the wrought-iron fence.

Shouts come from the house; half the upstairs windows are lit, now. She forces herself to take one slow, careful breath, feeling her pulse jump and pound in her throat, forcing back bile and choking panic.

She can’t fall apart now. Finish the job, shut down everything you’re feeling until you get out, Mozzie always said. She grabs onto the iron crosspiece at the gate, hauls herself up, swings her legs carefully over. The moon has gone behind clouds again. She needs to stay calm, keep moving and get back to Neal and Mozzie; once she’s someplace safe, then she can fall apart.

She lands in wet grass, feels the dew soaking through the knees of her pants. Looking up, she sees the grey shape of the van up the street, and she remembers.

Neal and Mozzie aren’t waiting. And there is no safe place here.

She crosses the road in the shadow between the streetlights, jogs up the sidewalk and wrenches the door open.

Maurice raises both eyebrows at her; the other two agents – both young, and relatively inexperienced, she decides – start at her appearance.

Maurice says, “What the hell happened in there?”

“I got the job done.” The door bangs open again to admit two more agents; Fowler brushes past her without a word or a glance, so she drops the flashdrive into Maurice’s hand, turning to look for a place to sit down. With Fowler’s return there are now five FBI agents crowded into a very small space; she’s never been claustrophobic before, but this is a lot of feds in one place.

Fowler pulls a water bottle from somewhere and holds it out toward her, still without looking at her. She takes it with her left hand, tugs at her right glove with her teeth and tastes blood.

One of the younger agents hands her a wad of tissues; she pulls the gloves off, drops them beside a darkened monitor and dabs at her face with wet tissues; they come away bright red, soaked and staining her fingers.

Fowler takes the drive from Maurice. “Get back to the office and go over everything you got from the security cameras. Anything that might be useful.”

Maurice nods. “And the drive?”

Fowler gives him a look. “Let me handle that. We’re going back to New York.” Inclining his head in Kate’s general direction, still without looking at her. “You can drop us off at the train station.”

***

She ducks into the train station bathroom while Fowler buys the tickets, checking the mirror to make sure she doesn’t still have blood on her face.

She doesn’t, but she can see vivid bruises in the shape of someone’s fingers on her throat, red darkening to purple.

It’s nearly three AM. The station is quiet, only a few passengers on the long bench seats, slumped and dozing against their suitcases. 

She sees a red scarf lying on top of a backpack beside a sleeping woman; she waits until the ticket agent is looking the other way and picks it up, wrapping it around her neck and tucking the ends under her sweater.

Fowler’s eyes slide past her as she moves to stand beside him at the ticket counter.

A second later he looks directly at her for the first time since they got out; with a sharp frown, he hands her a ticket and steers her away from the counter with a hand at her elbow. “Did you just steal that from someone’s luggage?”

“We broke into someone’s house only two hours ago,” she says quietly, as they turn toward the doors to the platform. “And we need to talk, and it’s going to be hard to hold a conversation with you if you won’t look at me.”

His face shutters abruptly, his eyes blank and cold as the station intercom crackles, calling _all aboard for the 97 to New York._ “You _have_ done your homework.”

She hears yawning and subdued grumbling behind them, passengers stirring, bleary and tired. Fowler pushes the door open and they move along the platform, following the line of the tracks as the train whistle shrieks; the door closes and then there’s only the pounding of the wheels against the track, getting closer, the beam from the light in front of the locomotive slicing through the night mist.

She can hear the clanging of the gate coming down at a nearby intersection, blocking traffic as the train slows to a halt. As they wait at the platform’s edge she says, “Tell me honestly you haven’t read every letter Neal wrote to me from prison and I’ll apologize for invading your privacy.”

They walk past their assigned seats, between rows of sleeping passengers, until they find the café car. The car is empty; the counter is deserted, but there’s a vending machine humming in a corner. She checks her pockets for change then holds out a hand; at his look, she says, “Or I could break into it.”

He rolls his eyes and gives her a handful of quarters; she pulls out a glazed pastry filled with some red fruit that doesn’t really taste like cherries. She goes to lick the glaze sticking to her fingers, then remembers some guy was bleeding on her hands not too long ago and wipes them on a napkin instead.

The train whistle keens, a long plaintive call blown back to them in the wind of their passage; the rhythmic rocking of the wheels is inexplicably soothing.

A drinks dispenser at the far end of the counter promises cappuccino. What it delivers is syrupy and far too sweet, but the combination of sugar and caffeine will jolt her awake. Fowler settles into a booth by the door with a cup of black coffee, opening his own laptop and inserting the flashdrive.

“Only meeting Reilly had last December was with an Armond Saletta,” he says, after a silence.

“Who’s he?”

“Italian. Here on a diplomatic passport, works at the consulate in New York.”

They are making progress, but she still can’t see the endgame clearly, and it’s making her twitchy and tense. Her hands still itch with drying blood and it hurts to swallow. She has seen too many dead men lately; the contact they talked to three days ago is dead, and that guy back at the house may be, too.

“So let’s say he’s got it at his house.” Because that’s easier than imagining Neal breaking into the consulate itself; she doesn’t doubt he could do it, but she doesn’t want to think about that right now. “Let’s say Neal gets it for you. Then what?”

“We’ve discussed this.” His voice is weary. “I’ve already got a guy setting up deep-cover backgrounds for both of you. The plane’s ready whenever you are.”

“That guy we talked to three days ago is dead. That doesn’t concern you?”

“I don’t see what you think I can do about it.”

“You don’t think whoever you’re working for decided he knew too much?” And this is it, what’s been scraping at the back of her mind, clawing at the edges of what triumph she has gained so far. She leans back against the counter, arms folded tightly across her chest. “You really think we’re all just going to walk away from this and go back to our lives when this is over?”

Something dark flashes in his eyes; he is trapped and he knows it, and the helpless rage has since worn itself down to despair, a fire starved and suffocated without oxygen. The edge in his voice is cold. “What choice do you think we have?”

His phone buzzes and his eyes close briefly; when he opens them his face is completely blank. “Yes, sir.” Her skin itches with frustration and anger; Fowler she can grapple with, him she can read. She is learning him, living this close. The voice on the other end of that phone is a mystery and a phantom and a constant unknown variable, floating in the mix of her plans and cutting an unpredictable swath through all her calculations. “This lead looks solid.” She can hear frustration in his voice, tense and stifled and half-choked. “We’re still checking, sir. I’ll call with an update when we know something.”

Her own frustration is going to lead her to do something reckless and stupid, the longer she has to stand here quietly and listen to only half this conversation. The longer she waits, the more she feels it’s not stupid at all, but the only possible way forward. She sips at her cooling cappuccino and makes a face.

“You realize there’s a good chance your friend on the phone paid that guy to kill her so he could set you up.”

The words are out before she has a chance to think better of them.

“Do really think that thought hasn’t occurred to me?” And there is rage there, still, compressed and squeezed flat like molten glass; she sees it flicker and then fade, banked, behind his eyes.

“And you’re okay with working for him?” Her voice rises.

“I don’t know who he is.” His voice is quiet but no less sharp. “I don’t know his name, I don’t know what he wants, I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if the person I talk to on the phone is the one behind it all or just an intermediary. He uses a voice-changer and he calls on a line that can’t be traced. Believe me, I’ve tried.” The train whistle moans again, calling a warning; his voice drops the temperature in the car, his eyes flat and cold. “Put me in a room with the son of a bitch and I’ll show you how okay I am with it. But unless you can make that happen -”

“I can’t make it happen if you’re not going to help,” she snaps, and he blinks; she’s managed to surprise him. “This is never going to end as long as we keep dancing to his tune whenever he pulls the strings.” She steps sharply toward the booth, braces both hands against the table. “Whoever he is, he’s already hurt people we love and I, for one, am tired of being used by him. I’m tired of being helpless and I am sick to death of being a pawn.” Her voice has dropped to a low furious hiss as she leans toward him, holding his eyes fiercely. “What about you?”

He only stares at her, his face completely still; when no answer comes after a long, tense silence she straightens and walks out of the car, making her way back to her seat. She curls up against the window, exhausted and keyed up and still furious, shivering against the glass.

Some two hours later the train pulls into DC and stops. This stop is longer than most; in DC the diesel locomotive is switched out for an electric one; the hum of the air conditioner and the rumble of the engine both fade and die as the power cuts out, leaving only low emergency lights glowing in the darkness. The sun won’t rise for another hour at least.

The stirring of sleeping passengers is loud in the thick silence; the abrupt loss of ambient noise is enough to wake some. The car door opens and she sees Fowler out of the corner of her eye, coming down the aisle; she doesn’t turn from the window as he sits beside her. He says nothing as they wait. The air grows thick, getting warmer with the air conditioner off.

Thirty minutes later the new locomotive is hooked up and the power comes back; cold air blasts against her arm, leaning against the window vent. Fowler hasn’t moved the whole time, but she can tell he’s not asleep. He doesn’t speak until the train starts moving again, his voice pitched low beneath the rattle of the wheels.

“You do realize,” he says, without looking at her, “in the extremely unlikely event that we’re able to find this guy, I have no intention of arresting him.”

She stares at her own reflection in the window, her eyes dark and uncertain above the red scarf, her face overlaid on top of the dark trees blurring past. She wonders, not for the first time, if Neal will recognize her when all this is over. She wonders if she’ll recognize herself.

“Yeah,” she says at last, without turning. “I kinda figured that.”

They don’t speak for the rest of the trip, as the train rocks north into a weak and watery dawn.


	7. Chapter 7

They’re in New York in the afternoon; Kate allows herself exactly five minutes in the shower, scrubbing furiously at her hands, her face, her neck. That’s all, then she clamps down hard on any further reaction to last night’s job, dresses carefully and joins Fowler and two other agents in the living room. She manages to stay awake until sunset, watching them go through the flashdrive for additional clues, before she retreats to her bedroom.

She curls on her side under the blankets, facing that giant poster of The Greatest Cake hung on the wall; she sleeps like a rock until well after eight, and if she dreams she remembers nothing.

“You’re moving,” is all Fowler says when he bangs on her door the next morning. She’s nearly dressed, tucking the scarf carefully around her neck as she opens it. She can see the other two agents watching from the couch.

“Good morning to you, too,” she says. “Where am I moving to, exactly?”

“Down the hall.”

She yawns deliberately, stretching both arms over her head. “And why’s that?”

“Information security.” At her raised eyebrows: “You have a habit of … snooping where you shouldn’t, and we deal with sensitive information here.”

She glances up coolly at the other two, who’ve come to stand behind him, says quietly, “I think that horse is out of the barn and halfway to New Jersey, but if it makes you feel better …”

“And don’t get any ideas about escape plans, either. You know what’s at stake here.”

They lock stares for a moment, then he jerks his chin toward the door.

She takes her time rolling up the posters carefully; she can practically feel him rolling his eyes behind her. It makes her smile.

There’s not much to move, only her coat and her bag; she carries the posters in one hand down the carpeted hallway. It’s a suite at the end of the hall, right next to the door to the stairwell, smaller than the other but still more space than she’s had to herself in - God, she can’t think how long. She stows her things in the closet, walks across the floor to pull open the blinds over the balcony doors.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have.” She turns in a circles, surveying the couch, the tiny counter with a coffee machine and a minibar by the sink, two mugs and two wine glasses set out neatly upside down on coasters, along with a tiny foil-wrapped chocolate.

If he doesn’t want her watching him, fine. She’ll take the space to work without him watching her so closely.

“ _Don’t_ get any ideas,” Fowler says, as if he hears her thoughts, then turns to the other two agents. “What are you two staring at? I want a full report on Reilly in an hour.” After they’ve disappeared, he says, “Come on.”

And he walks away without looking at her, clearly expecting her to follow.

She can decorate and sweep for bugs later. She waits until the elevator doors close on them before asking, “Now where are we going?”

“There’s a courier van out back,” he says. “Arrived from DC this morning. This was your brilliant idea, you can help me carry the boxes up.”

Cryptic, she thinks, but says nothing; they go out through the back doors behind the hotel bar, out to an alley where a van is idling by the door.

The two boxes in the back are stamped DC Metro Police.

“All the files are here. There’s a flashdrive in one of these with everything the Bureau dug up after they got the case. I’ve been over these.” Fowler shoves one box in her direction and picks up the other. “The investigation lasted six months. I could recite everything in every one of these files for you backwards in my sleep.”

“That won’t be necessary.” She grabs the door handle, pushes the door open with her shoulder as she lifts the other box. It’s heavy, she decides, but not unmanageable. “Never know what fresh eyes might find.”

He gives her a doubtful shrug. “You think you can dig up something useful, here’s your chance to try. If nothing else it might keep you out of trouble for a while.”

“I dug up plenty on you,” she says, with an edged smile.

“Someday you’ll have to tell me how you did that.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” And then, when he walks past the elevator bank toward the stairwell door in back of the restaurant, “We’re carrying these up thirty flights of stairs? Seriously?”

The door bangs shut, echoing off bare concrete walls. She stares up at the first landing, at the harsh fluorescent lights.

“Less likely to run into people back here,” he says, and abruptly she gets it.

“Information security.” Silence, until they reach the third landing and she pauses for breath, resting the edge of the box against the cold metal railing. “You don’t want your other agents to know I’m looking into this.”

His only answer is a _well, no shit_ look.

“You don’t trust them.”

“I don’t trust anyone and that includes you.”

She gives the wall a thin smile as she trudges up toward the next landing. “Are they squeaky clean boy scout types who think Mentor’s a legitimate op? Or are they watching for your friend on the phone to make sure you don’t step out of line?”

“I have no idea. All I know for sure if none of them actually work for me.”

Her legs are burning by the time they reach the thirtieth floor, but she doesn’t allow herself to flop into a chair; she doesn’t drop the box with a thud, either, but sets it carefully in the back of the closet on top of the other one.

“It’s safer for both of us,” Fowler says quietly, after setting the chain across the door, “and Caffrey, too, if this side project stays between us.”

She gives him a _do I look like I’m stupid?_ look.

When he’s gone she allows herself the luxury of walking through the suite and soaking up the silence and the unexpected solitude. Then she puts on a pot of coffee, lets the tiny dark chocolate melt in her mouth while the coffeemaker gurgles, and does a more careful sweep. She finds two audio bugs, one in the bedroom and one in the living room; there’s a hidden camera just over the coffee pot.

She stomps the bug in the bedroom; it makes a satisfying crunch as she twists her heel on top of it, grinding tiny wires into the thick plush carpet. She’s been told she talks in her sleep, though Neal swears it’s never anything coherent.

He’ll expect her to check for bugs; he won’t believe she’d miss all of them. But if she removes them all he’ll only plant new ones. She makes sure to hang the posters on the wall in full view of the camera, and spends a good ten minutes seriously considering adding pink sparkly hearts after all.

She loosens the scarf when the wool against her neck starts to make her skin crawl, stretches sore arms over her head and allows herself to fall backward onto the bed, staring up at the still fan blades. She’s still got it, she thinks. She hasn’t executed a real break-in in nearly a year, but she can still scale a wall and think on her feet with the best of them.

She kicks her shoes off and draws her legs up onto the bed, sitting up and clasping her arms around her knees, wishing fiercely for Neal and Mozzie. She’s still wired, even after more than twelve hours’ sleep; something like this, she needs to talk it through with Neal and Mozzie to wind down, but they’re not here.

She wishes for cheap pizza and expensive wine in hastily-rinsed coffee mugs; they’d be sitting on the floor in some dingy highway motel right now, punch-drunk on success and still buzzing from the near brush with disaster, dissecting every moment, every call and every unexpected turn. Mozzie would be critiquing her climbing form, Neal telling her she’s beautiful in black; they’d be up all night, until they’d taken the operation apart, then Mozzie would grumble something about kids these days taking too many risks while his eyes said Neal was brilliant.

Then he’d leave, and Neal would pull her onto his lap and they’d try to be quiet, tearing each other’s clothes off; they’d try to be quiet, giddy laughter lost in adrenaline-soaked, desperate kisses; she’d shove him backwards onto the carpet, tug her hair down (he loves to run his hands through it) and let it fall around his face, leaning forward, her arms bracing her above him; she’d brush her nose against his, lightly, teasing, watching his slow grin, his eyes dark with wanting her.

Some days all she can think of is the last time he touched her, his arms wrapped around her in that long-ago interrupted reunion; some days she can’t think for wanting him. And some days she thinks it’s been so long since anyone touched her that when he finally does, she won’t be able to feel anything at all.

She remembers the coffee half an hour later, when her eyes start to cross trying to decipher notes scribbled in the margin of a witness statement.

Fowler is on the phone when he comes back, some seven hours later; he chains the door shut behind him and barks, “I’ve _been_ on hold for twenty minutes, are you telling me -” Silence, and a scowl; she raises both eyebrows. “You want my badge number again?” He recites a number, then shakes his head in frustration. Looking at her, he asks, “Learn anything interesting?”

“Metro detectives have godawful handwriting?” she offers. “I feel like I need a cryptographer, here.”

“I could’ve told you -” He stops, half turning away to speak into the phone once more. “ _Yes,_ this is Agent Fowler.” A pause. “No, he’s not family, he’s a person of interest in a case I’m - all right. You’re sure?” Another pause. “All right. _Thank_ you.” The last is bitten off, impatient, and then he snaps the phone closed.

“What was that about?”

“That was the hospital in Alexandria. A Michael Simpson was admitted two nights ago. He’s a security guard at a private residence, came in with a knife wound in his neck.” He puts the phone back in his jacket, looks up and holds her eyes. “They say he’s in stable condition, expected to make a full recovery.”

“Oh.” She tries to picture the man’s face and can’t; she can only see blood along the side of his neck, and the pattern carved into the chest he’d fallen against, some stylized twisting vines. Her voice is remarkably calm and cool, she thinks. “That makes things less complicated.”

He’s still watching her, waiting for some further response, but she has none to give. Then he’s crossing the room in two quick strides; she can’t see a reason for the sudden alarm in his face until her legs fold up with no warning, pitching her toward the floor.

She can’t see; she feels him shove her into a chair, one hand forcing her head down between her knees. A black haze spreads in spots across her eyes, lit by dizzy sparkles; her lungs feel heavy and squeezed flat. She can feel the hard wood of the chair under her, she can feel the carpet against her feet and still the dizzy tumbling in her stomach tells her she’s falling. A wash of heat prickles across her skin; her mouth waters and she tries, three times, to swallow; for a long moment she’s afraid she’s going to be sick.

Fowler’s hand is not gentle; his grip is iron, holding her down when she tries, weakly, to sit up. She can hear her own breathing, harsh and unsteady and strange; her heartbeat is a thundering rush in her ears, the voice of the ocean trapped in a shell.

Her vision clears slowly, purple sparks still dancing at the edges as she hears him walk across the room. The balcony door slides open and a breeze sweeps over her. The air is too cold but she welcomes the bite of it, a startling slap against her face as she sits up, wiping sweat from her forehead with the end of her scarf.

“Don’t,” Fowler says, somewhere behind her, as she tries to stand; her legs are weak and turn to water at the attempt. She leans back, breathing carefully through her mouth, staring at her hands and trying to calm rising nausea.

The scarf has come loose; she ought to wrap it again but she doesn’t think she can stand the feeling of anything touching her neck right now.

She hears a clink of glass and then Fowler is beside her, setting a coffee mug on the table with a short, “Drink.”

Whiskey, she thinks, and by the smell of it strong enough to strip paint. Her hands are shaking badly but she downs it in a single gulp, warmth spreading along the back of her throat. Fowler is still holding the bottle; he pours another generous shot as she sets the mug down, then walks away to return the bottle to the minibar.

He stays there, standing at the counter with his back to her, feigning interest in the coffee pot or the top of the counter for a good ten minutes while she lets the buzzing lassitude of alcohol soak through her, giving her a degree of privacy while her breathing returns to normal and her hands (mostly) stop trembling; it is a gesture of consideration she did not expect from him.

Finally, he turns and moves to take a chair across from her; he says, quiet and serious, “Reilly is dead.”

He slides a printout of a news article across the table; Edward Reilly, thirty-three, shot dead on a street corner just after dark. The implications sink in quickly enough, even in her current shocked state. “Someone’s cleaning up loose ends.”

“So it seems.” 

She stares at the photograph, thinks of the narrow-faced little man at the Argentinian mission who’d pointed them toward Reilly in the first place. He’d been frightened and alone; Reilly was a professional, and a dangerous man to cross. Whoever took him out knew what they were doing.

“He knew too much,” she says; she’s half drunk or she wouldn’t speak so calmly. The whole thing is detached, somehow, like a puzzle she’s working out, one of Mozzie’s training exercises. Still she can taste adrenaline, sour and familiar, as she looks up. “We’re not getting out of this, are we?” She breathes out slowly, shivering in the cold wind from the balcony. “No matter how far away we get. Whoever this is he’s not going to let us go.”

Fowler doesn’t answer. She thinks he ought to look more disturbed than he does; they’re not going to let him go, either. He’s in this as far as she is, farther, most likely. He says softly, “We don’t have much of a choice, here.”

“He knows about the plane.” Words come slowly, thoughts moving thick and syrupy like honey. “Our escape plan.” Fowler only nods. “He’ll follow us.”

“You and Caffrey are pretty good at hiding,” he says.

She laughs, short and sharp. “If we were that good I wouldn’t be here. And he wouldn’t be -” She lets out a shaky breath. “He won’t stop until we’re dead.” A pause. “Or until he thinks we’re -” She stops. “We can fake our own deaths.”

Fowler’s voice is dry. “That’s very Romeo and Juliet of you.”

“It’s a classic.”

“Yeah, and as I recall it didn’t work out too well for them.” He regards her seriously. “Look, once we’ve got the box -”

“We can crash the plane.” The breeze from the balcony stirs her hair, tugs at the edge of the nearest poster. “Ditch it in the water and swim to shore.”

He continues as if she hasn’t spoken. “He wants the music box, and once we’ve got it -”

“You think once you have the box you can use that as leverage to get some answers.” She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table. “You think he hasn’t planned for that? He’s going to have some kind of contingency plan for you not handing it over, and he’s not going to be stupid enough to meet you himself for the handoff.” Fowler’s only response is half a shrug. “You want to get at who’s really behind all this, or you just want to go down in flames for her?”

“If you’ve got a better plan, by all means feel free to share.”

“Look, _our_ deal was you get the box and then you cover our escape,” she says sharply. “Does he know what names you’re giving us?”

“I don’t even know what the names are yet,” he says. “But even if somebody sees the plane go down over the water you can’t assume he’ll be satisfied with that. Even if you can slip ashore without being seen by anyone, he’ll keep looking unless he sees bodies washing up on the beach.”

“What if it explodes in midair?”

“Then you both die quickly?”

“We can get parachutes or something.” She waves a hand in the air. “One of those inflatable rafts. We can do it at night - easier to see the explosion, harder to see us jump.”

“That is the most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard.” He shakes his head. “You ever jump out of a plane before?”

“No, but -”

“Caffrey?”

“Does base-jumping count?”

“No, base-jumping does _not_ count. Believe me, if you’re looking to get yourselves killed there’s quicker and less painful ways to do it.” He sighs, short and explosive. “You’re not jumping into the Med, here. You’d be coming down somewhere off the west coast of Ireland. Even if this drags out till spring the water’s going to be _frigid._ You’ll both freeze if you don’t drown, and that’s assuming you know what you’re doing with the parachutes and you don’t smash into the tail as soon as you go out the door.”

“You have, though.” She leans forward as he rolls his eyes. “You were in Special Forces. You can show me what to do.”

“I spent weeks at Fort Benning training under highly qualified instructors with specialized equipment. That was over a decade ago. As I’m sure you know, since you’ve read my file.”

“You keep the token with your laptop password in your right jacket pocket,” she says, with a slow smile. He looks up, surprise flickering in his eyes. “Oh, come on. How did you think I got on the FBI servers?”

He studies her carefully, his face still; his voice holds only dry amusement when he says, “I should get you drunk more often.”

She blinks, and decides she wasn’t likely to get any more opportunities to get at his laptop anyway, now that she’s in her own room. “You’ve been sharing hotel rooms with an accomplished pickpocket for nearly a year now. Don’t tell me this is a surprise.”

“You want to tell me how you got to what’s not on the FBI servers?”

“Nice try.” She shakes her head slowly; she’s still a bit lightheaded, but she decides that’s the alcohol this time. “I’m not that drunk.”

He gives a _can’t blame me for trying_ shrug.

“I’m serious,” she says, after a silence. “Tell me what we’d need to pull this off.”

“A couple months training for both of you and a completely different type of aircraft,” he says. “And at this stage we can’t get either without tipping our hand. He knows I’ve got a Learjet ready to go already. I swap that out for something with a proper jump door and he’ll know you’re planning a jump, which would kind of defeat the purpose.”

“You’re telling me we can’t jump out of a Learjet that’s about to explode?”

“Only if you -” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.”

“Come on -”

“Kate.” He fixes her with a measuring look. “You’re drunk and you’re tired and we are not discussing this tonight.”

She sits at the table as the wind from the balcony turns colder; she closes her eyes and sees dark water, steep whitecaps rising in ridges all the way to the horizon.

She wakes up and she’s slumped over the table; it’s dark, and the blinds rattle an irregular tattoo in the cold wind. Yawning, she manages to close the balcony door and find her way to the bedroom in the dark; lying on top of the blanket, she doesn’t bother to take off her shoes. Her head is clearer, now, and she knows she’s right.

If they’re going to survive, she and Neal can’t just disappear. Someone who can get to Edward Reilly won’t stop until he’s sure both of them are dead.

***

It’s a familiar game, dragging a pair of young agents through the streets, letting them think they’re tailing her until she decides to slip behind a sign and duck through a shop and out the back door. Half an hour’s back and forth travel on the subway later, she’s sure no one is following. She hasn’t played this game in a while; it’s reassuring to know she can still shake a tail when she has to.

Fowler is waiting in her room when she returns, standing when she comes in.

“Where the hell were you?” he demands, angry and suspicious. She studies him coolly, leaning against the back of a chair. She hasn’t dropped off the grid like that since before they’d made their deal, she realizes.

“Keeping my skills sharp,” she says; he does not look amused. “Sporting goods store on 4th. You can ask the clerk if you want.”

He blinks, then shakes his head, anger fading to exasperation. “Looking for parachutes?” At her nod: “I take it they didn’t have any?”

“They know a company that will special order them.”

“You’re serious about this.”

“I’m serious about getting Neal out of here alive. I’m serious about the two of us not spending the rest of our very short lives looking over our shoulders. If you’ve got a better plan, please share.”

He shakes his head and walks out without answering; a few hours later he comes back long enough to throw a small book on the table; the nondescript green cover reads _Special Forces Military Free Fall Operations._

“Read it.”

She keeps it tucked behind the bible in the nightstand; she pulls it out and reads a few pages of technical descriptions when she needs a break from deciphering illegible handwriting and staring at crime scene photos. Fowler spends the next week in DC, and the subject doesn’t come up again until he returns.

He arrives in the evening; she hears him barking at the other agents all the way down the hall. Fifteen minutes later he’s in her room; he says nothing at first, only gives her a measuring stare until her eyebrows go up, impatient.

“We’re picking up chatter from independent sources,” he says finally, “saying the box is in New York.”

She doesn’t yell _HA!_ Or _I told you so,_ however tempting it is. She only nods firmly. “Like I said. You give me a reason to work with you, and we start getting somewhere.”

His mouth twists in something that’s not quite a smile. “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” she asks, as the elevator doors slide shut.

He doesn’t answer.

***

They leave the car in a lot some twenty minutes away. Fowler pulls a duffel out of the back seat and says, “Turn off your phone.”

He pulls out another set of keys as they approach a weathered pickup parked in the shadow of a nondescript office building; whatever is piled on the back is covered by a dusty tarp. “Get in.”

She can hear the muted call of a foghorn as they pull up in front of an abandoned warehouse, some few blocks away from the docks. The door is caked with rust, but it rolls up smoothly and silently like it’s been recently oiled. The concrete floor is dusty and marked with bird droppings, and a drift of leaves tapers into a pile of trash in one shadowed corner. But the newspapers taped carefully over the windows are dated from only last week.

An empty swimming pool opens in the center of the floor; it looks nearly fifty feet long and nine feet deep at the far end. The tiles are yellowed like old ivory, and speckled black with mildew stains.

The ceiling is high, at least twenty feet; she hears a rustling and a chirp as a pair of birds take off and disappear through a gap in the corrugated iron roof.

Fowler flings back the tarp over the truck bed, revealing a load of wood chips and handing her a shovel.

She looks at him. “You want to explain what we’re doing here?”

He hefts a shovel full of wood chips, throws them onto the floor beside the empty pool. “Moving all this -” he waves at the loaded truck bed “- onto the floor over there. Unless you’d rather practice falling on bare concrete?”

The air is cold; she’s sweating by the time the truck bed is empty, her arms and shoulders sore, and she shivers once she’s standing still. Fowler drags the duffel out of the truck, pulling out a tangled mess of heavy straps.

“What’s that?”

“Parachute harness. Pay attention,” he says. “You’ll be doing this for Caffrey, if you go through with this.”

He points to each of the different straps in turn and then makes her practice fastening and unfastening the clasps half a dozen times before he even lets her put it on. Patience and curiosity are wearing into frustration by the time he actually puts it on her back, the parachute hanging in a folded square like a backpack from the shoulder straps.

It’s heavier than she expected, sliding down to knock at the backs of her thighs.

“Now lean forward and fasten the chest strap,” Fowler says. She bends over and locks the chest strap into place as he shoves the folded parachute up her back until it bounces off the back of her head. And then, as she’s about to straighten up again, “ _Don’t_ stand up,” 

She stares at her shoes, feels him tugging at various bits of the harness, and the whole assembly tightens around her chest and shoulders.

“Now the right leg strap,” he says, and then he has one hand on her hip and the other reaches between her legs to pass her the end of the strap.

“Okay, _seriously_ -”

But he only says, “Take this, _don’t_ twist it, and attach it to the leg strap in front,” impatiently, as if she’s not bent over with her ass practically in his face, so she takes the clip and slides it into the other end before he repeats the process with the left leg strap.

“Can I stand up now?” she asks, with exaggerated patience. He shows her where to hook her thumbs through two metal rings on the chest strap.

“Pull down and then stand up straight,” he tells her, and she feels him pull on something else and then the whole thing is wrapped uncomfortably tight around her. As she fastens the waist strap in place, he says, “We’ve gone over how this is a stupid plan, right?”

“More or less stupid than assuming we can hide forever if we don’t convince whoever’s behind all this that we’re dead?”

He doesn’t answer at first, dragging a box about two feet high next to the pile of wood chips. He takes the parachute off of her, and puts on a second harness without a chute on the back, without responding to her raised eyebrows.

“Marginally less stupid, or we wouldn’t be here,” he says finally. “There’s maybe a fifty percent chance that both of you will survive this. That’s assuming everything goes according to plan.”

She spends the next three hours jumping off that box.

Halfway through he adds a second box. “Keep your feet and knees together,” he says; she loses track of how many times he’s said that. He has her practice landing, touching down on the balls of her feet and then falling on her side, coming to land on her back.

There’s a cable hanging from the rafters, attached to a pulley of some sort with a carabiner clip on one end. It’s nearly dark by the time he clips this to the straps on her back, wraps the other end around his waist in a belaying knot.

She sees the end of the rope in his hand half a second before her feet leave the ground. Cold air streams past her face; she flings her arms up instinctively, shielding her head as the ceiling rushes toward her, but she stops some two feet from the roof.

Someone’s initials are carved into the long wooden rafter beam just above her head; she can see a long-deserted bird’s next resting on it as she spins slowly in midair. The roof itself is corrugated iron, sagging in places, leaking white light around the seams. A biting breeze stirs her hair; Fowler says something below but she can’t make it out.

Then she’s falling.

She’s fallen farther, both on purpose and by accident, so her only audible reaction is a brief, startled squeak; the place echoes, but she tells herself she’s far enough up he might not have heard.

She lands in a bruised, graceless sprawl the first time, but the second time she’s prepared and lands the way he showed her.

“How’s that?”

She’s reminded again of Mozzie as he gives her a measuring stare; it’s almost like the early days with Neal, learning to scale security fences and crack safes. She is reinventing herself again, crawling out of an old skin that will no longer serve her, but she comforts herself knowing she’s done it before.

“This is _not_ how you’re supposed to train for this,” he says.

“No shit,” she says. But they don’t have the luxury of an entire Army base to work with, so they’ll have to make do the best they can. “What about a boat? What else are we going to need?”

“I can get a boat,” he says. “And you’ll need lights, and wet suits.”

“We’re trying to be stealthy, here.”

“You need to be able to find each other and the boat. Quickly.” His eyes are serious. “It’s going to be _freezing_ , even if you don’t get out of here until next August. The plane’s not big enough to get you to any warm water that’s outside US jurisdiction.”

She sighs. “What else?”

“I know a guy who knows a guy who can do something with the door.” He shakes his head. “I have no idea why I’m even doing this.”

After another three falls, she stands and brushes splinters out of her hair and says, “Because you get a sadistic pleasure out of dropping me on my head over and over?”

“There is that.”

“What’s wrong with the door?”

“It’s not the kind of door you jump out of.”

“It’s a door. It opens, you go through it. What’s the issue?”

“It’s in the wrong place.” At her look: “Jump door needs to be behind and below the wing. Even with a draft baffle attachment rigged up you’ll need to cut the engines on that side before you go or the draft will blow you straight into the tail.”

He shakes his head again. “Once this goes down,” he continues, “you’ll have to take off and get out of the country right away. There’s no telling what the weather’s going to be but you could be jumping in rain or snow or high winds or God knows what other conditions where any trained military team would abort.”

“Fifty percent chance, huh?”

“That’s a best-case scenario.”

She closes her eyes, sees the terrified face of their contact at the Argentinian mission; she sees that news article about Reilly, shot dead on a street corner.

Her legs ache and her back and shoulders are a mass of bruises when he finally unhooks her from the ropes nearly two hours later. She still watches him, watches the ends of the ropes, wary and untrusting of the steadiness of the floor under her feet, but she can’t help feeling pleased with herself for all that; it’s the same sweaty, exhausted sort of triumph she’d felt each time Mozzie looked at her like maybe she wouldn’t turn out to be completely useless after all.

She’s exhausted and sweaty and covered in sawdust once she’s hauled herself up the stairs to her room, but it’s a bruised exhaustion that comes with dragging herself forward another step. She’s making progress, and so is Neal; she can learn this.

She won’t be able to tell Neal any of this until they’re in the air, she realizes, as she stumbles into the shower.

She can close her eyes and see him, the exultant light in his eyes, his wide open grin whenever Mozzie grudgingly acknowledged she’d done something right. She wants to tell him all about it now; she’s learning how to jump out of planes. He’d be so excited for her.

But she can’t tell him about this plan. She loves him, and she knows he loves her, but this is not a brilliant, stylish heist they’re planning. Both their lives depend on absolute secrecy, and she’s still afraid of his inexplicable trust in Burke.

She’ll tell him all about it later. Once they’re away, once they’re safe; she lets the hot water pound her aching shoulders, soaking her hair and running down her face, lets herself imagine a hotel in the south of France where they’ll spend all day in bed, watching the sun drift lazily across the sky and telling stories of everything that’s happened since they’ve been apart.

***

They come back to the warehouse the next two nights, and do the whole thing again. The next three nights she doesn’t leave the hotel, but he has her stand on her bed and fall, repeatedly. It’s at once deadly serious and mildly ridiculous; the whole thing feels faintly surreal. She thinks she’s going to start hearing _feet and knees together_ in her dreams.

He has her spend hours putting the harness on herself; then she practices putting it on him. After the first twenty times, she’s over feeling awkward about the whole thing. After that, he puts it on himself and makes her check the whole assembly, altering some tiny thing each time to see if she’ll catch the mistake; this exercise is accompanied by detailed commentary on what will happen if each tiny mistake isn’t caught.

But for the first time in a long time she feels like she’s making progress toward a goal; the motions are becoming automatic.

She can’t help wondering at the amount of time Fowler is devoting to this, all amusement value of watching her add to her collection of bruises aside. Perhaps he’s as tense as she is, waiting for Neal or Alex to make the next move with the music box and needing to be busy with something. Or perhaps he figures she’s less likely to try anything if he makes sure she’s exhausted all the time.

On the fifth day, she says, “Not that I’m not having fun, here, but why am I practicing falling on the ground when we’re landing in the water?”

“I have a guy coming to fill the pool tomorrow morning,” is all he says.

It’s late in the afternoon when they arrive; reddening light slides along the surface of the water. The smell of chlorine mingles with the salt smell from the docks.

“Depending on the wind,” Fowler is saying, pulling something out of the truck with a rustle of dull green silk, “the chute might fall on your head as you come up out of the water.” He thrusts the edge of the canopy into her hands; the material is thinner than she expected, trailing ropes of differing thickness; seams branch out from a hole in the center, giving the whole thing the appearance of a spider’s web. “You panic and get tangled up in it, you’re going to drown.”

She nods, watching as he shakes it out, letting it spread over the surface of the water like a net, or a blanket. “You come up underneath the canopy you want to feel for a seam and then follow it. It’ll take you to the edge or the middle.” He tilts his head toward the water. “Get in.”

She shrugs out of her coat, kicks her shoes off and lowers herself quickly into the water; it’s cold, and the breeze from the door blowing past her wet hair is colder still once she surfaces. She shivers, treading water more vigorously than strictly necessary as she watches him.

“Duck under and find a seam and find your way to the middle. _Don’t,_ ” he adds, “dive under and swim the whole way. You’ll be wearing a life jacket, so you’ll have to stay at the surface.”

The material is disturbingly clingy when wet; still the seams aren’t hard to find, and she ignores the clammy, cold silk trying to press against her face and holds her breath until she feels empty air and her head finds the hole at the center.

He has her practice some two of three dozen times; the air is cold and she’s shivering, her fingers fumbling with the seams. The sun has set, twilight leaching light from the corners of the room, when he rolls the door shut, blocking the last of the sun and plunging the room in darkness.

“You’re going to be doing this at night, remember?”

She can do this, she thinks, after she’s found her way out from under the chute several more times in the dark.

The next afternoon, she’s got a life vest on under the harness; he goes over how to remove the straps before he drops her in the water. She’s starting to get the motions down after half a dozen falls, unhooking the chest strap as she descends, releasing the leg straps as she hits the water and swimming out of the harness.

The sixth or seventh time she breaks the surface of the water and something wet and clammy wraps around her face, stopping her nose and mouth when she tries to breathe. She can’t see, and the only sound is the slap of water and the sudden fierce rush of her heart thudding in her ears; she tries to retreat underwater but she bobs back up almost immediately, held by the vest.

Her vision greys out and her lungs burn and she can feel hands at her throat, squeezing; she’s not sure what happens after that, until she inhales water and the burn of it snaps her back to the present, the smell of chlorine thick and choking and something wet and filmy and impossible to grasp as spider-silk slowly suffocating her.

Grey darkness turns to bruised yellow sparkles as she tries to feel for a seam but the whole thing is hopelessly tangled and her arms feel heavy and useless, dragging at her. Then abruptly she feels cold air on her face.

She gasps, coughing; she blinks and for a second she sees blood on her gloves and her knife in a man’s neck before Fowler squeezes her arm, shaking her. The chute is a crumpled wet mess floating amid trailing lines a few feet away; Fowler is beside her, still holding her arm, and she has a sudden feeling he knows exactly what she’s seeing.

She kicks instinctively, treading water, though the vest is still holding her up; she thinks if he offers the least expression of sympathy she’ll hit him.

But he only holds her eyes and says, “You sure you still want to do this?”

She allows herself a few more gasping breaths; she’s not about to give up after one mistake, however frightening and humiliating. She doesn’t have a choice; she glares at him and bites out, “Yes.”

She barely has a chance to think before she’s flying out of the water. Find a seam, she’s thinking, but the cold breeze shocks her, brings on another fit of coughing and she can’t get a deep breath; she has no time to recover near the ceiling before she’s falling again, and by the time she can inhale deeply water fills her mouth, closing over her head.

She surfaces into a faceful of wet silk; she tries to breathe, tries to cough and this time blind panic takes over; the more she flails at it the stronger and more closely wrapped it feels, and colored lights explode in twisting ropes of fire behind her eyes and now she can’t tell which way is up or what she’s fighting. Hands grip her arms and she lashes out blindly, moving slow and lethargic despite the thrumming escalation of her heart; the shroud is finally peeled back from her face and she still can’t see.

The room is dim, the sun nearly gone; this time Fowler has to drag her to the edge of the pool; her stomach lurches, twisting suddenly inside out and she hangs on the concrete lip at the edge, retching, for nearly five minutes.

Fowler’s voice holds neither amusement nor sympathy as he says, “We’re done with this as soon as you say we’re done.”

She swore, once, that she’d never let him see her afraid. 

She spits in the water, caught by a surge of shame and fury and absolute loathing; through chattering teeth she snarls, “Go to hell.”

He gives her no more time to recover; ten seconds later she’s falling again. This time she accidentally flails upward, stabbing with her hand, creating an air pocket between the chute and her face; she’s able to grab one breath that way, and that’s enough. Her fingers are nearly numb by now but she feels for a seam, holding her breath and running her fingers along it until she reaches the end, pulling the chute off over her head, paddling in a graceless, exhausted stroke for the side.

She clings to the side, gasping, knowing she has only a few more seconds before he pulls her up and drops her again and not wasting any of them on triumph.

The next time she stabs upward deliberately at the chute, and again the resulting air pocket gives her enough breath to remember how to extricate herself. It’s completely dark by now; she loses track, quickly, of how many times she’s done this; the next hour is blur of dark water and wind on her face and her hands are learning the motions, releasing the straps and fighting free of the chute, and somewhere in the middle of it all her mind shuts down and retreats somewhere dark and cold.

Sometime much later a blanket is wrapped around her shoulders; a blast of wind hits her as the door rolls up and a hand at her elbow guides her toward the truck; a second blanket is draped over her as she sinks into the seat. She blinks as the overhead light comes on, temporarily blinded; the engine starts and when she can see again Fowler is leaning across her to point the dashboard air vents in her direction.

She’s shaking violently, even with the heat turned up full blast, and she doesn’t stop until they’re back at the hotel.

Three times she wakes up to find herself sitting on the concrete stairs; three times she manages to stagger upright again and continue up a few more flights before she decides to sit down and rest. The fourth time Fowler shakes her awake, she squints up at him and sees a purple bruise and drying blood on the side of his face.

She blinks, asks blearily, “Did I do that?”

He nods once; she shivers involuntarily, caught by a blurred memory of darkness and water burning her throat. It hardly seems fair; after all the times she’s wanted to punch him in the face, over the past year, once she finally does she doesn’t even get the satisfaction of remembering it.

She doesn’t realize she’s spoken that last thought out loud until he laughs; it’s a real laugh, brief and startled, echoing sharply in the narrow stairwell.

Sometime after that she’s leaning against the counter in her tiny kitchen nook, in a dry bathrobe with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders; Fowler has disappeared into her bathroom. She pours herself a shot of whiskey as she hears the shower come on, sips slowly until he reappears in dry clothes, rubbing a towel over his hair. 

“Aren’t your other agents going to start wondering where you’ve been?” she asks, setting the glass down. “Or do you really think they haven’t noticed us sneaking up and down the stairs at night?”

“Oh, they’ve noticed.” He drops the towel on the counter. “But they’ve jumped to their own conclusions about what we’re up to, and I doubt any of those involve parachute training.”

Her brain is sluggish enough that it takes a moment to sink in; when it does, she snorts. “I’m offended at their low opinion of my taste.”

That gets half a smile, as he pours himself a shot. She thinks of where his hands have been, and hers, simply in the process of attaching the legs straps, and laughs out loud.

“I’m working on getting a plane,” he says, serious now.

She pauses with her own glass halfway to her lips, glaring at him. “You said you already had one.”

“I do.” He sighs. “But we can’t use that one to practice. He’ll be watching it; if it moves before I tell him I’ve got the box -”

“So we need another plane to practice.” She wonders, again, at the lengths he’s going to here; she’d been trying to think of a way to suggest a practice jump, but she didn’t expect him to go for it, much less suggest it himself. “Can we get one?”

“I’m working on it,” he says. And then, “You do realize all of this - everything we’ve done here - you’re going to have a few hours, max, once you’re in the air to teach Caffrey everything he needs to know so he’ll do it all right the first time. Or -”

 _Or he’ll drown._ She lets out a shaky breath, shivering again as she pulls the blanket closer around her shoulders, dull fear struggling with exhaustion.

“Do you still want to do this?”

The question is quiet and serious; she looks up. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

He holds her eyes, repeats it deliberately: “Do you still want to do this?”

The certainty and confidence she’d been building over the past few days is gone, lost in the memory of chlorine clogging her throat. But she’s tired of running. She’s tired of being a sitting target. She’s tired of looking over her shoulder; she’s tired of being angry and afraid all the time. It’s a risk, and a terrible one, for both of them, but it’s also the only chance she and Neal will ever have at any kind of permanent security and freedom together.

She nods once, swallows the rest of the whiskey in a single gulp. “Yes.”

She dreams of floating on a raft in the ocean, tall waves and a dark sky, patches of stars peeking between heavy clouds. The waves are tall, whipped by the wind, throwing cold spray over them; it’s raining but she and Neal are both soaked so they hardly notice. They’re huddled together, Neal behind her, his arms wrapped around her and his head resting on her shoulder; she can feel him shaking, hear his teeth chattering and that’s how she knows he’s still alive.

She wakes slowly; the dream clings like morning fog and there’s a moment of panic as she realizes she can’t feel Neal at her back anymore. She reaches for him and her hand strikes the side of the tub; she’s in the shower, she realizes, still wearing the bathrobe, and the water coming down has long since gone cold.

Wrenching the water off, she has just enough strength left to peel out of the wet robe and stagger toward her bed; crawling under the blankets, she curls up in a tight, shivering knot and lets sleep break like dark water over her head.

***

Three days later they’re driving back sometime after midnight and he says, “Maurice has been looking into the Italians. The Consul-General is stopping in New York for a day and a half before he goes to DC, supposed to be picking something up.”

“When?”

“Two and a half weeks,” he says. “Your boy’s running out of time.”

“He’ll get it.” Still her nerves are stretched thin, not knowing Neal’s plans or being able to work on it with him. “ _We’re_ running out of time. What about a practice plane?”

She stifles a yawn; it’s barely two AM and she knows she won’t be able to sleep until sunrise. Tonight, like last night, was spent dragging a heavy life-sized mannequin onto a tiny inflatable raft; once dawn comes, she knows she’ll dream of Neal, floating unconscious in cold water. She shivers.

“I’ve called everyone I know, and nothing’s available in the next two weeks.” He sighs, short and frustrated. “If you know anybody who’s got one -”

She’s falling back into old sleeping patterns, since they’ve started training at night; the old crawling itch to _get moving_ is back, with a force she hasn’t felt since those first weeks after she’d been caught. A few nights spent flailing in the water and once again she’s unable to sleep in the dark; she tries, for a few days, and finds herself starting awake in the early morning dark, staring at the window and fighting the nameless, clawing urge to run.

By now she’s given up; once they get back to the room, she’ll drag out those case files and make coffee and sift through old witness statements until the sun comes up and the light tells her it’s not safe to move anyway so she might as well hide and rest.

She sleeps lightly, even during the day, and wakes suddenly and completely at each noise in the hall.

The next evening they’re waiting for the coffeemaker when her phone rings.

It’s a sudden, loud buzz, vibrating against the hard surface of the table, and she whirls, wide-eyed, before she realizes what it is. Fowler looks up but doesn’t comment on her reaction; she startles easily, these days. Somehow over the past two weeks her unconscious reflexes have reset back to flight mode, and it’s becoming increasingly inconvenient when she’s not ready to run yet.

She lets out a slow sigh, breathing in the smell of coffee and forcing herself to relax as it rings twice more, before picking up.

“Who is this?”

For half a second she expects to hear Neal’s voice; he doesn’t have this number, and she could only lie to him if he called, but for a second she’s caught by a desperate, aching need to hear him.

“Kate.”

Adler.

Her hand clenches around the phone; Fowler is watching her face, quietly alert.

“What do you want?”

“I want to help you,” he says, and there’s a note in his voice that’s both cold and condescending at once, familiar and infuriating, scraping away at her badly frayed composure. “I hadn’t heard from you, and I thought I’d check and see if you’d thought about my offer. I have resources that could be useful.”

She can’t deal with him tonight. She’s tired and she’s sore and she’s holding herself together by her fingernails and she needs all the emotional reserves she’s got to face another few hours of flailing about in the water in the dark, and she’s about _this_ close to hanging up on the smug bastard when some part of her brain more concerned with self-preservation says bluntly, “I need to borrow your plane.”

Fowler’s eyebrows go up; she’s almost as surprised to hear the words as he is. For a long moment there’s only silence on the other end of the phone.

“That’s - an unusual request,” Adler says mildly. “Are you going somewhere?”

“No, I’m looking to fly it around in circles,” she snaps, and breathes out slowly, counting to five before she continues. “A short trip upstate.” She mouths _tomorrow?_ at Fowler, and he nods once. “Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have it back to you by the next morning.”

“Any particular reason you need to get out of the city in such a hurry?”

“You said you wanted to help.” Her fist clenches on the table; her voices rises sharply, and she calms herself with an effort. “This is how you can help me. I need an answer, now, and I’m not going to beg. Yes or no?”

The words hang in the air; by the look on Fowler’s face, she wonders if her voice sounds more frayed than she realized.

“There’s an airstrip by the river,” Adler says at last. “The plane will be waiting at five.”

The coffeemaker spits as she hangs up on him, announcing a full pot with a sputtering hiss. “We have a plane,” she says. “Courtesy of Vincent Adler.”

“Your friend from Argentina.”

She nods, pouring coffee and covering another yawn; she’s exhausted and keyed up at once and she thinks she hasn’t had three hours’ sleep at a stretch in over a week; she’s hoping tonight’s training might wear her out enough so she can sleep.

“Can we get a pilot by tomorrow afternoon?”

She doesn’t doubt Adler will send one with the plane, but she’s not about to trust the least details of this exercise with anyone connected to him.

Fowler nods, and says, “There’s something we haven’t talked about.”

She looks up, sips at scorching black coffee, wary. “What’s that?”

“What’s going to happen to your pilot? When you do this for real?”

“I don’t suppose you can find us someone we can trust to keep a secret.”

He only shakes his head. She stares across the room at the warm circle of amber lamplight pooled on the carpet, her own reflection in the glass doors across the balcony.

She crosses the room, pulls the blinds closed with a rattle that’s loud in the sudden stillness. Comes back and leans against the counter, picks up her coffee mug and sets it down again, watches the blinds swaying.

She hears Fowler pouring his own coffee, doesn’t look at him as he says, “You’ll have to kill him or convince him you’re both dead.” 

And she wants nothing more than to be fighting with the straps and that damn raft, held under with the water filling her mouth and stopping her ears so she doesn’t have to hear this, doesn’t have to even think it. 

Fowler continues, quietly, “The former would be less complicated.”

“Neal will never go for that.” And she stares down into her coffee, closes her eyes against a sudden intense surge of love and gratitude that steals her breath. Neal will never agree to any plan that involves leaving a man on a plane that’s about to explode to preserve the secret of their survival; he’d refuse to jump at all. He’d offer the pilot his own chute first. She knows this like she knows the sound of her own heartbeat. If by some miracle she got him off the plane, he’d never be able to live with himself; he’d never be able to look at her again.

Neal won’t let her make that decision; the choice is out of her hands.

 _I love you,_ she thinks, and sips slowly at her coffee and waits for the fierce wash of longing to subside before she looks up. “How do we convince him we’re dead?”

Fowler looks at her for a long moment like he’s about to argue, and then sighs. “You can force him to jump a few miles before you do,” he says finally. He’s thought about this, she thinks. “Tell him you’re stealing the plane. Have him set the autopilot. He’ll see the explosion but he shouldn’t see you jump if you’re far away enough.”

She makes herself ask the question, though she doesn’t want to hear the answer. “What are his chances of surviving alone in the water?”

“Not good,” he says. “Not that yours are much better.”

“We can give him a radio. So he can call the Coast Guard, or something.” She’s grasping at straws.

“Do you really want patrol boats in the water only a couple miles away from you two when that plane explodes? They’ll be looking for wreckage right on top of you.”

She sets down the mug hard enough to slosh hot coffee over her hand and onto the counter. After a few beats of silence, she asks, “Can you find us a pilot who’s trained in water survival? Ex-military, or something? Someone who’d have a fighting chance?”

He nods, and if the slight catch in her voice is audible he pretends not to notice.

“And another boat for him. And a chute.”

“Anything else I can get for you? A pony, perhaps?”

She snorts a laugh, inhaling hot coffee and burning the roof of her mouth before she glares at him.

“Something else to think about,” he says. “Anyone with that kind of training is going to know he’s got a better chance on the plane than in the water. Unless you’re going to tell him it’s about to explode, which would kind of defeat the purpose of making it look like an accident.” He looks at her. “I can get you that pilot. I can get you an extra boat and an extra chute. And I can get you a gun.” The words hang in the air between them. “But you have to understand it’s not a magic wand you wave at somebody and they do exactly what you tell them. The gun’s worse than useless if you’re not prepared to use it.”

He continues as she looks down, studying the carpet, “If you tell him to jump and he doesn’t, you’d damn well better be prepared to shoot him.”

She swallows with an effort, asks finally, “What about tomorrow? Where are we going?”

A long silence, and he decides to let her change the subject. “Lake Champlain,” he says, looking away at the door. “There’s a place along the shore where we can pull the boat up, get dry clothes and spend the night. And a car we can borrow to drive back in the morning.”


	8. Chapter 8

“I have strict instructions to stay with this plane,” Adler’s pilot says, standing in the door as they approach the stairs.

It’s a tiny airstrip and nearly deserted; there’s only the one plane idling at the far end of the single runway. The sky is overcast, pale ash darkening to slate, clouds hiding the sinking sun; the place is starkly flat beyond the hangars and a cold wind tears across it, filling and snapping at a lone orange windsock.

Kate hefts a heavy duffel over her shoulder; she’s uncomfortably warm, wearing a wet suit under her clothes and her wool coat, despite the wind on her face.

“We’ve got our own pilot,” Fowler says, nodding at the man standing beside him; he never did give her a name.

She and Fowler exchange a look; maybe Adler really is that concerned about his airplane. Or maybe he’s just nosy and suspicious. But he’s not someone she’s willing to trust or involve in their plans any more than she has to.

“My employer isn’t about to trust anyone he doesn’t know at the controls,” Adler’s man says, “Your request was for transport. He’s certainly not about to hand over an expensive aircraft to someone of your - background and connections.”

Kate wonders if he can be bribed, either to get off the plane or keep his mouth shut; she’s too tired and nervous even to bristle at Adler’s nerve, sneering at _her_ as a thief.

“Your employer is a wanted fugitive,” Fowler is saying, flipping open his badge. “I’m seizing this plane and anything on board as evidence.” He lets his right hand drop toward his belt. “You can leave quietly, now, or I can arrest you and bring you in for questioning.”

Or that works, too, Kate thinks.

As their own pilot settles into the cockpit a few minutes later, Fowler has him give Kate a thorough description of the controls; she pays special attention to the ones for setting the autopilot and turning off the engines.

“You never did say where we’re going,” the pilot says, once he’s finished.

“You’re making a low pass over Lake Champlain while we jump out,” Fowler says. “Don’t need to pick us up, we’ll be driving back.”

The pilot blinks. “She’s not equipped for -”

“You let me handle that.”

Buckled beside the window, she watches the grey runway fall away, the landscape spread below growing smaller, city blocks and the long snaking curve of the river, thick mats of forest beyond veined with branching roads, dark asphalt running out into dust-tan, bursts of flaming color shot through deep summer-green in a slow-spreading blaze, autumn catching fire below them.

Then mist is tearing past the end of the wing, ripped and fluttering like grey rags, until they bank upwards and a cloud swallows them.

“All right.” Fowler releases his seatbelt and she does the same as they break into clear pale blue sky, shading to white and then red. Up here the clouds form an uneven carpet, stretching in ridges toward the setting sun, touched by streaks of red. “The pilot’s jumped and the autopilot’s set. I’m Caffrey.” He nods toward the crate with the chutes. “You’ve got thirty minutes to get those on both of us and explain what we’re going to do. Go.”

She glances out the window once before standing; the cloud layer looks solid, like some grey alien furze thicket, like the terrain of some harsh, hostile other world. The sun is gone, leaving a shrinking red stain across the darkening surface of the clouds, like a splash of drying blood.

She gets the chute harnesses on both of them without a mistake, and all the while she’s thinking they’ve skipped rehearsing the hardest part. Even so her stomach is coiled into a hard knot, and her heart is too loud and too fast.

Halfway through her explanation, the pilot breaks in on the intercom to say they’re over the lake; Fowler tells him to swing wide around and make another pass because it’s not full dark yet.

“He’s going to have to trust me,” she says. Or he’ll have to jump without trusting her; she can hardly say she trusts Fowler, but she’ll jump tonight when he tells her. She can hardly say she trusts Neal, when she can’t tell him any of this for fear Burke will find out.

She loves him; she can count on his love for her; this will have to take the place of trust as well as honesty. She wonders sometimes if Neal has ever trusted her; she wonders if he’s ever trusted anyone at all, or if what he calls trust is only a willingness to take the fall.

She’s the one who left; she’s barely spoken to him in almost a year. Burke, damn him, has as much trust as Neal gives anyone; Burke believes she never loved him, thinks she’s after Neal’s money. And then, while Neal’s belief in her is still so fragile, she’s going to point a gun at a man while he watches. 

She’s going to point a gun at their pilot and force him out of the plane. And then she’s going to ask Neal to trust her, to step out of that door into the night.

She feels the floor tilting as the plane banks. The pilot’s voice comes on the intercom: “Ten minutes.”

Neal will jump when she tells him, she knows, not because he believes she won’t betray him but because he’s willing to let her.

Some part of her heart curls into a hard, sick knot at the thought, but she’s desperate enough to use that, if she has to, if it will keep him alive.

She looks at Fowler, says, “You were in Special Forces.”

Fowler only tilts his head at her, curious. She puts a hand out, grips the back of the seat as the plane banks again; the last light from the window slides away out of sight.

“You’ve done things you can’t talk about.” At his _no shit_ look: “Before - stuff that was classified, I mean. You had to keep secrets.” She can still hear Neal at Grand Central, his voice raw and desperate, calling her name; she can hear Mozzie, _if you’d just tell him what’s going on._ “From - people not in your unit.”

The sky is a deep midnight velvet when she feels the plane turning again. The cabin is dark, Fowler’s face barely visible in the dim emergency lighting. For a long time there’s no sound but the engines.

Then he says, in a completely unreadable voice, “Did you just ask me for relationship advice?”

A beat of silence, then another. “Oh God, I did, didn’t I?”

Then they’re both laughing; she’s bent over, clutching the back of the seat, shaking quietly; it’s a release of something, she’s not sure what. For a long time she can’t stop, but when she manages a few gasping breaths some of the the frantic, fluttering panic in her gut has eased.

She swipes the back of her hand across her eyes and tastes salt; she looks up as the pilot says, “Beginning descent.”

She says, soft and level, “We will never speak of this again.”

“Agreed,” he says. “You’ve got five minutes to get the draft baffle hooked up to the door.”

Through the window she can see the red light on the end of the wing, blinking steadily, catching and reflecting off the fog; an eerie red halo surrounds it. Then they’re dropping beneath the clouds; she sees lights, white and amber clustered in jeweled array, flung like a heavy necklace around a wide patch of soft grey dark.

The lake, she thinks; toward the edges she can see lights reaching, long docks stretching into the water; it all looks like a landscape of miniatures.

“Five minutes,” he says.

She’s braced for the wind as she wrenches the door open, slamming into her, cold and fierce, buffeting her face and making her eyes water. It’s the noise that surprises her, a sudden roaring, rattling growl.

She’s careful, snapping several pieces of thin steel into the doorframe; the overall effect extends the doorway out from the side. She manages to tighten the clamps in place without anything falling out.

“One minute,” Fowler shouts, behind her. The wind beats at her, grabbing at her hair like a living thing; she holds onto the inside of the door and feels for the ripcord handle at her shoulder with the other, in a sudden fear that it might have blown away.

It’s impossible to judge distance, looking out the door. The world is soft grey smoke, lights seeming to flicker; her eyes struggle to make sense of what she’s seeing. Only the wing seems real and solid, a single red eye winking at her.

They might be drifting slowly, except for the roar of the wind. A thin streamer of mist whips past, up close giving the sudden impression of speed, a breath of fog or a fragment of a ghost.

“When’s the last time you did this?” She turns, looking at Fowler; her voice sounds thin above the engine noise, though she’s shouting.

“Twelve years ago.”

Whatever response she might have given is lost when the plane tilts again; the pitch of the engines on this side changes, sliding down a scale and then dying, leaving only the wind. Fowler gives a thumbs up and nods at the gear.

She cracks the lights attached to the supply crate and the boat (visible for up to a mile, Fowler said, so make sure you’re a couple of miles away from wherever you dropped the pilot); the boat is supposed to automatically inflate on landing in the water.

Fowler says, “Ten seconds,” and she tries to swallow, touches the ripcord handle again. She tries to picture Neal’s face; someday, she thinks, shivering, this will make a great story. Fowler says, “Stand by.”

At his nod she shoves the boat and the supply crate into the air, watches the blinking red lights fade below.

Somewhere warm, in the south of France, her and Neal and Moz sipping champagne while harmless fireworks explode outside and they watch through the windows; she tries to picture their faces but all she can see is a vague image of soft candlelight and shadow -

“Go.”

The command is followed by a sharp tap on her shoulder.

She’d meant to take a deep breath, preparing for the dive, but the muscles in her chest and throat have locked up. Some part of her brain shuts down, then, long enough to allow her legs to move; it’s a small step, a short distance, and then a sudden sharp drop that yanks her stomach into her throat.

The engine noise changes pitch and fades rapidly; all she can hear is the rush of wind past her ears, and after the first wild panic of falling her mind is bracing for water, for an impact within seconds that doesn’t come; she gasps, once, twice, expecting each breath to be her last before there’s no more air.

The world below is fuzzy, sketched in shades of charcoal, smudged and indistinct; she thinks the lights below might be getting nearer but she can’t tell. She might be floating; the wind whistles past her ears but the air beneath her feels like a solid thing; she might be lying on a soft down blanket. The thought comes to her that this is why they call zero gravity “free fall”; she is at once moving and still, falling and floating, suspended in a howling dark.

In a flash of fear she glances at her wrist; she can’t tell how long it’s been; she can’t read the numbers on the altimeter dial, glowing faintly, but there’s a red line drawn at the pull altitude and she can see the needle creeping toward it. The dark and the distance are messing up her depth perception; she fastens on that needle as a fixed reference point, moves her hand slowly to touch the ripcord handle. Her fingers are numb despite the gloves.

She wonders briefly what she’ll do if it doesn’t open.

The lines merge and she wraps her fingers around the handle and pulls, hard (what if she doesn’t pull hard enough? will she break it if she pulls too hard?) and for a timeless suspended moment nothing happens.

Her mind has frozen and she’s skating at the fine edge of panic when the harness jerks against her chest with a force like nothing she remembers from practice, like falling into a brick wall. The lights below waver and dance; she can’t tell if she’s seeing anything below her or if it’s only the illusion of sparks flashing before her eyes.

That sound isn’t the wind, anymore, whistling; her chest is tight and painful and it isn’t from the bruising impact of the straps. Her breath is coming fast and shallow, a high wheezing sound; she feels something squeezing her chest, like she can’t get enough air. She loses track of time again, closes her eyes and tries to slow her breathing.

When she can breathe again she thinks the lights are closer.

She’s upright, now; she can see her feet, still held together thanks to hours of practice as she hangs in midair, with nothing beneath them; she tilts her head back, feels a breeze stroking her hair; she can see the canopy, a dark shape spread taut above her head.

_Here goes,_ she thinks, it seems like much later, as the needle creeps lower and numb fingers work the chest strap loose. She hears a soft shush of waves and feels the familiar tense fear, waiting for the water; she pulls a tab and the life jacket inflates with a soft pop, sudden and startling.

She finds the release for the leg straps; a breeze touches her face and that light is the thin, horned reflection of a waxing quarter moon, broken by rippling water as the clouds shift. She barely has time to recognize it before the water’s surface is shattered by her feet; she pulls the leg straps loose and then water slaps her face, ice-cold and smelling like damp, half-rotted weeds.

The chute flutters down, caught by a faint breeze that pulls it away from her; it lands beside her, puddled like mercury reflecting the moonlight; she surfaces in clear air, kicks her legs and feels the water give back a solid resistance. She’s down.

She’s landed.

She arches her back and slips out of the shoulder straps, keeping one hand wrapped around the harness as she tilts her head back; she can’t see the plane. She can’t see Fowler, though she hears a distant splash somewhere behind her.

She draws in a breath, blows it out slowly, deliberately, fighting exhilaration and giddy laughter. She jumped out of a goddamn _airplane._  
And now she’s floating somewhere in the middle of a miles-wide lake and there’s a boat around here somewhere and she needs to find it.

***

_Find the boat first._ She shakes her head, trying to get water out of her ears, squinting in all directions; she’ll have to talk to Fowler about different colored lights. They all look the same at this distance.

_Then find your partner._ This had been another argument, one night when she was already worn out from dragging that damn mannequin onto that little raft, her mind spinning like a rat on a wheel over all the different reasons she might have to know how to get a hundred sixty pounds’ dead weight onto a tiny rubber platform without tipping the whole thing over.

_Your partner can’t get you to shore,_ Fowler said and it sounded like quoting a manual and she really did almost hit him, then, thinking of everything that might happen to Neal that she can’t fix. _Without the boat there’s not a damn thing you can do for him if he’s in trouble_ and that shut her up, though it didn’t calm her in the slightest.

The water is colder than she expected, even with the suit. She lets out a breath, kicking her legs in a scissor motion, more to keep warm than anything else; the vest holds her securely at the surface. After a few moments she can see a larger shadow behind the furthest red light, bobbing in a gentle swell.

(Of course it would be the furthest one.)

She kicks toward it, with a vigorous stroke meant more to warm her up than conserve energy, still grasping the harness in one hand. The distance is further than she expected. The boat fell straight down, she thinks, while the chutes are made for gliding; the weather tonight is calm, if overcast, and the lake’s surface is broken only by gentle waves.

Her arms and legs are burning by the time she reaches it, what feels like much later; she tries not to think how far away the boat might be carried by waves in the Atlantic, or how far high winds might carry her and Neal before they even land. She hauls herself over the side with a last effort, feeling like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to driftwood; the lake is wide and flat, and there are few other lights visible, and she’s alone.

It’s larger than the raft they practiced with in the pool but it’s still only inflated rubber; she crawls into the stern and finds the motor, resisting the urge to lie down and close her eyes just for a second; she’s this close to crashing down from the adrenaline spike and the gentle rocking motion of the waves could lull her to sleep far too fast.

The motor coughs, changing pitch as she grips the throttle; a silver-green wake trails quiet ruffles behind her as she picks a light and steers toward it. She’s shivering, hard, now; the hood on her suit slipped somewhere during the swim and her hair is soaked, trickling cold water down her back, and the wind on her face is colder as her speed increases. But she has something solid beneath her, and the motor responds easily to her hand. The next time the moon peeks through a thin patch of cloud she can see another chute floating, crumpled, a little ways off, like a thin silver lily pad or the translucent, amorphous cap of some enormous jellyfish.

“About time.” Fowler doesn’t move toward her, turning lazily instead to float on his back as she eases up on the throttle, lets momentum carry her slowly alongside.

“Are you seriously going to make me drag you -” She sighs, short and explosive, holding up a hand. She doesn’t think she can take listening to him go over all the reasons Neal might not be able to get himself into the boat.

Easing the boat closer, she leans over to grab the cables trailing like creeping vines from the canopy. She’s tired and this boat is different from the raft they practiced with; she barely has time to let out a startled squeak before she overbalances and goes headfirst into the water.

She coughs, inhaling water; the cold is a shock in her throat and the muscles in her chest freeze up for a moment; she holds onto the side of the boat for a moment, gasping, before she can drag herself on board.

Eventually she manages to tow him by the chute cables over to the side, wrapping increasingly numb fingers around his shoulder harness. She falls in at least three more times, once landing on top of him and dragging him underwater as well; this earns her a glare and a comment on how she’ll need to do this fast and they won’t be on a flat lake when it’s for real.

Sometime much later they’re both in the boat, with the chutes piled like a mess of sodden cobwebs in the bow. In the thin moonlight Fowler looks almost as exhausted as she feels; she swam to the boat while he waited where he fell, but he must have been treading water the whole time to keep warm.

“You’ve had some basic first aid training, I hope?” he says eventually, as she wraps her hand around the throttle and steers for the last floating red light. “In case -”

“Yes, I am familiar with the principles of rescue breathing,” she cuts him off, because she doesn’t want to think about Neal floating face down when she finds him. Her voice is rough, like she’s been screaming. “No, I am not practicing that on you.”

A quiet snort. “Good.”

They retrieve the crate with the supplies; all the lights on shore look faint and distant. “Now where are we going?”

“Make for the old water tower.” Fowler points at the shore; she squints for maybe half a minute before she can make it out, a pale shape against the darker line of trees.

“Have you trained up here before?” she asks; she’d never have been able to pick out the landmark if he hadn’t pointed to it.

He doesn’t answer.

They stow the lights inside the supply crate, going for as much realism as possible; she and Neal will be approaching the shore without lights to give away their presence. 

Mist hangs in clumps just above the water, fuzzy grey shifting to silver when the clouds part and the moon slips through. Above the low growl of the motor she can hear thick weeds brushing the underside of the boat. She keeps to a moderate speed, slowing as they come in closer; doubtless they’re breaking all kinds of water traffic laws running with lights out.

The houses are dark, along here; Fowler points further down without speaking and she eases the throttle back, steering parallel to the shore. The houses give way to a line of trailers, each at the end of a long wooden dock, small but neatly kept.

These are vacation homes, she realizes, summer retreats closed up and deserted for the winter.

She blinks, her eyes rough and gritty, as Fowler takes the throttle from her. As he cuts the engine and lets them drift in, she sees a bench at the end of the nearest dock, wood weathered silver-grey facing the lake, and a darkened lantern beside it.

_There’s a place along the shore where we can pull the boat up,_ he said, _get dry clothes and spend the night._ The trailer at the end of this particular dock is as dark as the rest of them.

“Are we going to break into someone’s summer house and steal their clothes?” she demands, twisting to look at him as he throws a rope around the nearest support pole. She presses a fist against her mouth to stifle bubbling, stress-soaked laughter. “Fowler, I underestimated you.”

“We are _not_ breaking in.” He inclines his head toward a ladder at the end of the dock, wooden rungs slippery with brown weeds or algae. “I have a key.”

Her legs are weak and rubbery; the dock sways gently, making it hard to balance as they drag the boat up, securing it with the rope. Wet oak leaves gather in slick patches on the wooden slats, covered in a faint layer of frost. The clouds are thinning out, now; she can see a wide patch of stars through the fingers of a bare branch, arching out over the water.

A gravel walkway leads up to the back of the trailer, neatly lined with a brick border; a stone birdbath sits beneath the oak, empty and choked with dead leaves. The boat shed at the edge of the bank is chained shut; beside it a shape that might be a gas grill is carefully covered with a tarp.

A patch of ground beside the door has also been carefully edged with bricks, but any dead flowers are buried under dying weeds. Kate says, “Dibs on the shower.”

If she has to wait, she thinks, she’ll fall asleep before she gets a chance.

The door opens and she gropes for a light switch as she follows him inside; the one she finds does nothing, flips on and off and back on again with no effect.

“Power’s turned off,” Fowler says, passing her a flashlight; twin beams cast cold blue circles on beige carpet. The words are oddly flat. “No one’s been up here since -”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Kate sweeps her flashlight around a tiny sitting room, covers a jaw-cracking yawn. Two armchairs face a cabinet that must hold a TV; the cabinet is closed, the top covered with a thick layer of dust. Beside it a low bookcase is stuffed with battered paperback novels.

The nearest chair pulls at her with a nearly irresistible gravity; she stares at it, at the throw pillow on the seat covered with a cross-stitched cardinal on a dogwood branch; she reminds herself she’s dripping lake water.

A doorway opens into a kitchen; she can see an empty counter, the cupboards closed, and a window covered with cheerful flowered print curtains. The air is cold and still; she can see her breath, a plume of frost picked out and shining white in the flashlight beam. 

Somewhere outside she can hear a branch creaking. The fear and the thrill of the jump have by now thoroughly drained away; she looks at the armchairs again and decides that they might be the most comfortable chairs she’s ever seen but they’re too far away.

She could sit down here, on the carpet in the entryway; she could sleep here. It’s a wall to lean against and shelter out of the wind and she’s not sure she’s capable of thinking or moving or doing anything further right now.

Fowler stops on the other side of the sitting room, in the open mouth of a black hallway; he doesn’t turn.

“Can you drive right now?”

She stares, blankly, at his back; the words take a second to process. Shivering, she wraps sore arms around herself, shaking her head against a slow-burning frustration. Her eyelids drag shut like sandpaper curtains, falling over her eyes; it’s an effort to open them again. She’s still groping for words to express how completely _done_ she is for today; _what happened to spending the night and driving back in the morning_ and it dies on her lips when he turns and looks at her.

His face is half-drowned in shadows but there’s a stunned, haunted look in his eyes like he’s been hit over the head and hasn’t figured out, yet, how to fall, a look that says he’d rather chew his own arm off than spend another minute in this place.

“You’re buying the coffee,” she says at last, breaking the long frozen silence, “first rest stop we see.” She offers nothing so useless as sympathy, straightening with an effort and scrubbing a hand over her eyes. “Can we at least get dry clothes first?”

She follows him down the narrow hallway; he keeps his flashlight trained on the floor, switches it off as they enter the bedroom.

“First closet on the right.”

She finds the knob, lets the door swing shut behind her. Nothing here but summer clothes, light blouses and t-shirts that do nothing to stop the chill air, but it’s all dry. She peels out of the suit, pulls on a pair of jeans that mostly fit. The only shoes are light, open sandals. There’s no faint lingering perfume, as she pulls a shirt on over her head, only the smell of mothballs.

A framed photo sits on the nightstand beside the bed; Kate recognizes Fowler’s wife, sitting on that bench at the end of the dock with a book on her lap, dark hair streaked with blonde highlights catching the sun. Looking up at the camera with a fond smile, thick black-framed reading glasses on the end of her nose.

And of course she looks familiar; Kate has been staring at crime scene photos for weeks, now. Still there’s something new teasing at the edge of her mind, a thread she’s too exhausted to follow right now; it’s the glasses that tug at an older memory. She wasn’t wearing them in any of the other pictures Kate saw.

She finds Fowler at the end of the dock, deflating the boat; he’s already folded the chutes and stowed everything in the supply crate. He holds out an FBI windbreaker and a set of keys without looking up. The jacket must be his; it’s about three sizes too big for her and the sleeves fall down over her hands.

A long gravel drive runs out to the road; a grey SUV is parked at the far end, frost sparkling on the hood and fogging the windshield. Kate twists the key, turns the heat all the way down and cracks the window an inch, rubbing her eyes hard enough to see gold and purple fireworks. The dashboard clock swears it’s only 10 PM.

Up ahead between thinning clouds she can see more stars, scattered above the horizon, winking like ice crystals or broken glass.

“Switch off in thirty minutes?” Her voice is scratchy and sleepless; the thought comes to her that this is stupid, and dangerous, but she doesn’t much care. “I’m not gonna last much longer than that.”

Fowler nods once beside her; cold air knifes through the open window as the car starts moving, an edge of ice that might keep her awake for a little while.

The roads are narrow and dark and nearly deserted; she follows the signs for the highway and every few minutes rolls the window down another inch. It’s barely 10:15 the first time she wakes abruptly at the shuddering vibration of the rumble strips along the shoulder.

The second time, she’s just steadied the car when Fowler touches her wrist. She starts violently, a sudden last-ditch surge of adrenaline and the car swerves into the oncoming lane before she rights it again; her heart is pounding and there’s a sour taste in her mouth.

The window is all the way down and the cold wind makes her eyes water, blurring the lines on the road; she’s already twisting the wheel to the right when he says, “Pull over.”

Her hands are locked onto the wheel; it’s an effort to pry them off. If anything it’s gotten colder, clouds massing again overhead. She slides into the passenger seat, fumbles for the lever to recline it and pulls the jacket cuffs down over her hands, wrapping her arms around herself. The next thing she knows he’s shaking her awake and they’re parked under bright lights at a gas station.

The memory is there; she catches the last lacy cobweb-edge of a dream, fading like frost on glass under the morning sun as she sits up. Her old desk just outside Adler’s private office. Raised voices on the other side of the door, and a dark-haired woman in black-framed glasses walking out with a tight, angry expression, stalking past Kate’s desk toward the elevator.

***

A few trucks idle at the edge of the lot; traffic lights cycle through at a silent intersection across the way, casting warped reflections in the curved metal side of a tanker truck parked beside the convenience store. On the other side of the gas station a visitors’ center is closed up tight; faded posters of green summer lakeshore hang in the windows, bleached by the sun.

She’s reminded of too many nights on the run, in rest stops like this one when the night took over and the place became a different world than in the daylight. 

The diner is quiet; it’s close to midnight and there’s only a few customers here.

“Coffee,” they tell the waitress in unison, before she has a chance to speak.

“Long night?”

Kate says, “You have no idea.”

They’re in a booth where they can both see the door, cracked red vinyl seats and a retro glass-and-chrome tabletop; water drips from her hair onto the paper placemat, blurring the words on the menu. She tugs an errant strand of some aquatic weed out of her hair, drops it on a napkin.

Fowler says something and then the waitress is looking expectantly at her; Kate says, “Make it two,” and hopes he ordered something good.

The whole scene feels somehow fragile and unreal. The real world is held outside, wrapped in darkness and banished behind wide glass windows. The lights are harsh and too bright, and she imagines they’re no kinder to her than to Fowler; he looks as worn and wrung-out as she feels. 

She wraps both hands around her mug when it arrives, closes her eyes and sips slowly and tries to stop shivering.

“How did I do?” she asks finally, because someone needs to start a conversation or she’s going to fall asleep again before the food arrives.

“You got down and you’re alive,” he says. “It’s a start.”

“I did good,” she says, and maybe he’s too tired but he doesn’t contradict her. Bells ring as the door opens, letting in a blast of cold air; Kate glances impatiently toward the kitchen. She thinks she’s passed through exhaustion to some vague, dazed state on the other side; she remembers this, too, the point past which her mind shut down and instinct took over, some part of her more concerned with survival shutting down thoughts of self-pity or fatigue, all mental and physical reserves devoted to moving a little bit farther ahead.

But instinct only got her so far, and it won’t serve her here. She tugs down the braids that are slipping loose, rakes her fingers through wet hair, spraying cold water against the side of the booth.

She needs to _think,_ now.

The waitress refills their mugs and Kate watches her walk away, picking up a red plastic stirrer and twisting it between her fingers. Finally she looks up at Fowler and says, “Why are you doing this?”

Both eyebrows go up. “’This’ being … what, exactly?”

“Tonight. Well, not just -” She waves a hand, describing vague circles in the air and nearly knocking over the menu stand. “All of it. The parachutes. The pool, the jump - helping us.”

“We made a deal.” He sounds patient and tired, stifling a yawn. “And I’m not doing anything for free, either. You’re still not going anywhere until I get the music box.”

“The deal was two clean passports and a plane.” She stares at him, doubt and suspicion warring with plain, honest curiosity. They’ve spent hours on this, nearly every night for the past few weeks; he’s almost as worn out as she is. The amusement value of dropping her on her head can only account for so much. “You’ve gone way beyond that. Not to stick my head in a gift lion’s mouth, but what’s in it for you?”

He rakes a hand through his hair, sighs before looking at her. “What may be my only chance to screw whoever -” He stops; there’s something cold and resigned in his eyes, and she waits while he drains the rest of his coffee. 

“I don’t know what’s so special about the damn box,” he says finally. “I don’t care. Once I have it I’m going to get whoever’s behind this or die trying.” He offers half a shrug. “We both know which of those is more likely to happen.”

The silence stretches as the waitress approaches; she sets down two plates piled with hot pancakes, a cup of warm apple butter and a tiny pitcher of maple syrup; she asks if they want more coffee. Kate says, fervently, “Please.”

“He’ll want you and Caffrey both dead as soon you’re no longer useful,” Fowler says at last. “Anything he wants that I can deny him is a victory.” The words are soft and blunt. “This may be the only one I’ll get.”

He’s not getting out of this; he knows that. They stare at each other for another long moment, and then at the same time realize that the pancakes smell delicious and are only going to get cold.

Kate nods once, accepting.

She spoons a generous portion of apple butter onto her plate, dumps half the little pitcher of syrup over the pancakes and practically inhales them. It’s not until they’re both finished, sticky plates stacked at the end of the table and a (third? fourth?) coffee refill in front of them, that she looks up.

“Did she work with rare manuscripts?”

Fowler blinks, surprised. “She was in archives.”

“I met her, once.” She’s sure of it now; she can half remember phrases of that conversation. It had been a heated one, and Kate’s job had often been damage control after Adler pissed off someone in a meeting; it was practically her duty to eavesdrop.

“When?” A sharp frown and a sudden focus.

“Seven years ago. When I worked for Adler.” And she’s suddenly awake, the memory coming clearer. “She was at his office for a meeting. She had something he wanted -”

She stops. She puts her head down on the table, laughing softly. It’s all clear, now, everything that went straight over her head at the time, Adler’s oblique suggestions and the tight outrage he got in response. Kate wonders, briefly, if she really was _that_ naive all along, or if she’d only chosen, on some subconscious level, to blind herself to who and what Adler really was.

She shakes her head, looking up at Fowler’s impatient glare. “He wanted her to steal something for him.”

“She would never -”

“No.” Kate shakes her head again, slowly, but something in the back of her mind is frantically putting pieces together and she doesn’t like the picture she’s starting to see. “No, he was pretty pissed when she left.”

“ _How_ pissed?” His voice is soft, flat and dangerous.

“I don’t suppose you remember what she was working on seven years ago. Or what she might have had access to.”

“She was helping with translations for a local historical society upstate,” he says, thoughtful and suspicious. “They’d just unsealed a collection of letters, some guy who was on a German sub in the Baltic -” Slowly, looking up at her, “- in 1945.”

“The year the music box was -”

He frowns. “It was never on a sub.”

“That we know of.”

“You ever been on a submarine?” He’s shaking his head, slowly, but he doesn’t look convinced. “They’re tiny; they’re not cargo ships.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious the music box isn’t just any cargo,” she says. “And it wouldn’t take up _that_ much space.”

“You think he’s involved in this?”

“Could be a coincidence. It was seven years ago,” she says, but she’s not convinced either; this, too, is familiar, the cold sick thrill that says she’s miscalculated badly, she’s tired and she’s starting to make mistakes. “Lot of those piling up lately.”

***

She’s strangely calm, walking back to the car; her eyes are dry and gritty but this is familiar, like pulling on a pair of worn, scarred old boots. It’s startlingly easy to fall back into _just keep moving push on a little farther,_ blanking out all thoughts of fatigue and dragging herself forward, past doubt and exhaustion and common sense.

Something in her mind has shifted, back to some lizard-brain knowledge of flight.

She takes the keys. It’s starting to snow as they merge onto the highway, wet heavy flakes sliding down the windshield. She remembers this, too, the feeling that her mind is clearer and sharper than it is; she’s so tired she doesn’t realize she’s tired. Some distant part of her registers that this is dangerous.

She wonders how far back this goes; maybe Adler was involved seven years ago and then wanted out. Maybe he wasn’t running from the feds, when he fled to Argentina.

(Then why did he come back?)

Seven years is a long time. (Adler is patient, meticulous, neat.) This might be a coincidence. (Whoever they’re running from doesn’t like loose ends.)

They switch off after thirty minutes; the next time Kate wakes the snow is heavier, falling in thick folds, surrounding the amber streetlights with dancing halos. The yellow center line is fading, blurred beneath soft fuzz.

She wonders if the ten million she might get for the Raphael could buy the pilot’s silence about this practice jump, if Adler decides to find him and ask why she really wanted to borrow the plane.

(Probably not. Adler has resources she doesn’t; she can’t outbid him.)

She slides back into the driver’s seat and turns on NPR, holding it to a soft murmur and hoping for a weather report as she pulls away from the shoulder. At least the snow held off until after they jumped.

She has to assume Adler will find out about this trip.

How high up he is in all this, if he’s even still part of it, and whether he can be bribed to keep his mouth shut - she doesn’t think she has anything he needs that he can’t get any other way.

Brake lights glow through dancing white and she slows; she’s behind a snowplow. A slow scraping sound ahead plays counterpoint to the rhythm of the wiper blades; a wet black ribbon of asphalt opens in the thickening white carpet ahead.

Adler was at the reception where they met the contact who pointed them at Reilly; he might have been standing close enough to overhear their conversation. He’d been there and now that contact and Reilly are both dead.

A faint buzz startles her; Fowler’s cell, muffled slightly by his jacket.

Fowler is asleep, his head fallen against the window; when he doesn’t wake immediately she slips a hand into his pocket and lifts the phone.

_Unknown number._

Red brake lights flare again up ahead and she slows further, still in the plow’s shadow. Snowflakes dance like dust motes, turning the headlight beams into something swirling and solid. The small, still voice telling her what she’s doing is reckless and stupid is acknowledged, not argued with, and then quietly ignored.

She answers without speaking, holds the phone to her ear; no sound comes, only the hiss of an open line and the loud thumping of her heart. She counts five long seconds and says, neutral, “Agent Fowler’s phone.”

The answering voice is electronically distorted, artificially deep with all emotional inflections ironed flat. “Put him on, please.”

“Do you know what time it is?” She blinks as the clock on the dash blurs: 2:14.

Fowler is sitting up, wide awake as soon as he sees the phone in her hand. She holds it out to him, wordless.

“Fowler,” he snaps, and she forces her attention back to the road, eases the wipers back a notch. “Sir. Like I said -”

Silence again, and she can’t read his face and keep the car going in a straight line, not when the lines in the road are nearly invisible. She’s almost brought her breathing back to something approaching normal; she’s almost resigned herself to hearing nothing interesting from his half of the conversation when he says, “You never mentioned the submarine angle.”

His tone hasn’t changed, but her heart is suddenly beating like some frantic winged thing at the base of her throat.

“Never mind how I know.” He sounds irritated, now, but a quick glance at his face catches a flicker of surprise, like he tried a stab in the dark and didn’t expect it to connect. “But if I’d known sooner I could have skipped chasing down half a dozen dead ends -”

At this rate she’s going to run into the damn snowplow.

She gives up pretending to pay attention to the road and pulls onto the shoulder, shifting into park and turning to stare at him. The wiper blades thump back and forth, showing the road ahead through overlapping arches windows, lit up by cold orange lights. The plow scrapes on ahead, a solid shadow fading and losing substance, dissolving in gauzy curtains of snow; the wet black strip behind it slowly lightens, tiny flakes draping a translucent veil over the right lane.

Fowler looks at her. “Perhaps we should discuss that in person.”

She’s not the only one feeling reckless and stupid tonight.

They’ve stumbled onto something, but how far he can push with it before it blows up in his face she’s afraid to guess. It’s a delicate balancing act, she knows. His eyes don’t leave hers as he says, “I want a meeting.”

She wonders if she can wrestle the phone away from him long enough to hit speaker without alerting whoever’s on the other end.

“I want to see your face.”

_The trick is to not look down._ She realizes abruptly she’s holding her breath. Fowler’s face reveals only the same tense uncertainty she feels.

His voice drops. “Do not push me too far.”

He hangs up. They stare at each other for a few heartbeats after he lowers the phone.

“Well?” she demands, as the silence lengthens. “You’re killing me, here.”

They both start at the buzz of an incoming text. He glances at the display, his face blank, and then passes her the phone. The message is short.

_JAN 15 12TH & WATERSHED MIDNIGHT._

“January -” It’s low and bitter and frustrated. “That’s more than two months away.”

Fowler lets out a slow sigh and scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s a start.”

“You rattled him.” She stares at the thickening snow; she almost can’t tell the right lane was ever plowed. “We’re onto something.” But what? “What do you know about this guy, really?”

“I know if he’s willing to meet me in person he’s not the one behind it all.”

“If we’re working together, I need to know what we’re dealing with.” She clicks the wipers back another notch, listens as the rhythm slows, long enough to allow a lacy filigree to settle over the glass, backlit in orange, between beats. “How about you fill me in on what I don’t already know?”

He shifts enough to give her a _look,_ and she waves a hand at the windshield.

“You really think we should keep going in that?”

“You first,” he says finally, with a sharp frown. “Tell me how you found out -” He trails off, tilting his head at her.

Fair enough. _Since we’re blowing right past all boundaries of caution and common sense tonight -_

She wonders if Neal and Burke have these conversations, _what were you_ really _up to when …_

“An … acquaintance … needed to get out of the country. Fast.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. Keller is behind bars, now, and she can’t say she was sorry to hear it; it’s not like she’s giving up an asset that might be useful later. “I gave him a clean passport and plane tickets to Oslo, in exchange for poking around and seeing what he could find.”

“Why Oslo?”

“It was the first trip you’d taken out of the country in ten years? And then all your files were sealed the minute you got back. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.” Half a shrug, leaning her head back against the seat. “Sometimes you take a stab in the dark and you hit something.”

She reaches out and clicks the wipers off. Stares at the windshield as tiny feathers of ice form and stick, crowding the glass, sharp crystals locking together and gradually filtering out the lights outside. The highway is nearly deserted.

The lights on the dashboard glow faintly; the radio is only a low murmur, and the silence is sudden and loud when she turns it off.

She doesn’t look at him. “Your turn.”

A slow-moving truck rumbles past, muffled and invisible; Kate imagines they are a soft white hump along a soft white road in the dark; the snow has covered the windows as well, by now. She reaches out to flick the hazard lights on and stares at the dashboard indicators blinking on and off, on and off.

“I thought we were at the wrong house.”

The snow moves in like a soft-footed cat, settling in silently and wrapping a long tail of white around the highway. The sound of the truck changes pitch and fades, slowly, ahead of them. She waits.

“We got called out to a home invasion in Georgetown. Me and my partner, we’d just come off an all-night stakeout. We’d been up since before midnight. It was bad.” His voice is expressionless, his face turned away from her, staring at the opaque wall of snow covering the window. “One victim, female, late thirties. Place was smashed, furniture all -” He stops, and for a long time there’s only the sound of the engine idling and the breath of warm air from the heater vents.

“Whoever the bastard was, she gave him one hell of a fight. It - wasn’t quick. Or easy.”

His tone doesn’t change but the words come faster, like he’s trying to finish this quickly. “We walk in the door and I realize I left something at home. To this day I can’t remember what.” He shakes his head slightly, still without looking at her. “So we get back in the car to go get it. I’m driving. And we get there and I walk in the front door and I swear to God my first thought is ‘we’re at the wrong house’.”

If she stares hard enough at the darkened windshield, she might almost imagine she sees light filtering through from an approaching dawn; that, too, is an illusion.

“I’d been up all night,” he continues softly. “I’m still wired from the stakeout and I’m thinking I was so out of it I somehow got turned around and drove right back to the crime scene.”

Kate says nothing. There’s nothing to say. She plays with the closest air vent, adjusting the aim, her fingers twitching and restless.

“Metro had the case for three months. Didn’t find shit.” The words are clipped, flat and a little breathless, aiming for matter-of-fact and coming out half-strangled. “Not like they didn’t know who to look for. They had his prints all over the place, and -” a brief hesitation, a convulsive swallow “- you read the file. The guy had a rap sheet. Priors for assault and B&E, suspected in two armed robberies. Nine o’clock in the goddamn morning.” One hand makes a quick, disgusted slashing motion. “Disappeared.”

“Probably had help,” she says quietly; it’s not even a guess, at this point.

A fraction of a nod. “The Bureau took over after he turned up in Maryland. Same MO, then he vanished again. I was on leave by then, but it was DC Violent Crimes working the case. They kept me in the loop. As long as there _was_ a -” The silence stretches thin. “Three months after that they start avoiding my calls. Beginning of March they tell me their last lead dried up a month ago and they’re moving on to other cases.”

His eyes close briefly. “It’s early August when I get the phone call.”

That would have been almost a year and a half ago, now. Kate wonders, again, how far back this all goes; whoever this is, he’s playing a long game.

“It’s an unknown number, and the voice - you heard him. Gave me an alias and a flight number. British Airways 1539.” His voice is steadier now, precise, though he still doesn’t look at her. “I got to Oslo three days after he landed, tracked him some fifty miles north to a hotel. Sat in the bar half the night - you know it doesn’t get dark until 11 up there, that time of year? Waited for him to show and followed him when he left.”

She knows what comes next; she’s not at all sure she wants to hear this. She keeps her voice carefully blank, says, “I read the coroner’s report.”

“He died quicker than -” He stops. “He died quicker than he deserved.”

She has no response to that.

“I went back to the hotel and waited for the cops.” 

Another plow scrapes by outside. Kate closes her eyes and she wants Neal, her Neal who flinches at the sight of guns and would never hurt anyone. 

“Waited four days until it hit me I’d have to go down and turn myself in or go home. No one was coming and the hotel reservation was only through the end of the week.”

“You didn’t know they got paid off?” Half a million from a DOJ account; whoever set this up has powerful connections.

He shakes his head. “The package with the tape came two days after I got back.”

She wants to see Neal, and hold onto him, and watch him and know he’s safe. She wants to be anywhere but here in a snowed-in SUV on a deserted highway wondering when (if) she’ll ever see him again. Wondering what she’ll have to do to see him again, what she’ll do to save him, and what she might do if she fails.

“He arranged the transfer to OPR,” he says, and it’s soft, defeated, distant. “Said he’d destroy the tape in exchange for the music box.”

“And you believed him?”

“No.” A short laugh. “But he wants that box enough to kill for it, and once I’ve got it I’ll have some leverage.”

“He’ll have planned for that.”

“Most likely.”

He knows he’s not getting out of this.

Kate gets out of the car. Caked snow cracks and falls from the window as she slams the door. It’s dark, still, and the snow is slackening.

Snaking lines of tire tracks weave unsteadily across the lane beside them. A car approaches from the south, going too fast; she looks down to avoid being blinded by the high beams, but she can hear tires sliding before it slows.

The engine noise fades and they’re alone. She finds an ice scraper in the trunk and goes to work on the back window first.

She’s finished knocking snow off the front windshield when she hears another vehicle approaching; it’s a slow-moving truck, this time, dumping sand along the road. She leans back against the hood, feels the vibration of the engine warm against her legs. Her feet are slowly going numb, thin sandals soaked with muddy slush.

She watches the truck approach and she’s already calculating whether she could jump on the back, gauging the speed and the darkness and the likely distraction and fatigue of the driver. There’s no cameras out here and she could hitch a lift and be fifty miles from here, at least, before she was noticed.

It won’t help. But she spent months on the run, months after that held leashed and afraid and it’s worn grooves into the back of her brain, in the pattern of her thoughts, that years of peace and safety (if they ever get those) might never sand down or erase.

She knows the speed of it, the distance from the shoulder, she knows the moment she could dart out and seize the handles at the back; she breathes out slowly, nails biting into her palms as she watches, still and frozen. She can’t run from this.

It isn’t Fowler she’s afraid of, right now.

She wonders if he knows that.

She wonders what she’d do, if she had ten minutes alone in a locked room with Ryan Wilkes. Or that Agent Rice. Or even -

She starts, whirling, before her conscious mind even registers the sound of the passenger side door opening.

“Where’s Neal?” 

She keeps her voice level and hopes it doesn’t come out sounding as small and lost as she feels. She doesn’t look at Fowler.

When there’s no answer right away, she says, “You’ve got the tracking signal on your phone. Where is he?”

Fowler touches the phone display and passes it to her. It’s almost three AM; that green dot glows steadily, unmoving, on Riverside Drive. She stares at it, shielding the phone from the sparse flakes still coming down.

She thinks about watching Neal sleep; he doesn’t snore, he doesn’t make a sound even waking from a nightmare; she can see him, his face soft and blurred in shadows, his mouth slightly open. He always knew; some sixth sense always told him; if she watches long enough he’ll come awake as thoroughly and silently as a cat.

It’s a sentimental indulgence, staring at that green dot, thinking she can wake him, thinking he can feel her watching still.

Finally she looks up; her eyes meet Fowler’s briefly as she gives the phone back. She says, low and raw and fierce, “If anything happens to him -”

It’s barely more than a whisper and her voice breaks at the end of it; she can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.

“Get in the car,” Fowler says at last, taking the ice scraper from her hands. “Get some sleep.”

The last thing she remembers, he’s twisting a dial on the dash and then warm air is blowing on her feet as they pull back onto the highway.

Pale light slices through the cloud layer when she wakes; there’s a blanket piled on her feet and her head is resting on his shoulder. If he’s noticed he makes no sign.

“Where?” 

He’s on the phone again. She sits up abruptly, blinking; the snow has stopped and the clouds are patchy, revealing a band of light at the horizon, pink and yellow pastels bleeding together in a watercolor sunrise.

“Oh, that’s helpful.” He sounds annoyed. “Did he say when?”

“Was that -?” she asks, rubbing her eyes and squinting against the daylight, trying to read the green signs flashing by as he hangs up. 

He shakes his head. “Maurice.” The road is mostly clear, except for clumps of wet sand and piles of snow heaped against the guard rail; where the pavement has dried she can see salt stains, irregular patterns of white on grey. “Caffrey called while we were out. Says he has a lead on the box. He wants a meeting at midnight.”

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, interrupting any reply she might have made. Fowler glances at her, eyebrows raised, as she pulls it out and frowns at the message on the screen.

Something in her gut twists, curling into a lump of ice. “Adler’s inviting me to dinner.”


	9. Chapter 9

Kate sleeps most of the day, waking at seven after the light has faded, just in time to wash the smell of the lake out of her hair and get dressed. The short black cocktail dress is hardly suitable for colder weather, but it’s the only one she has; she drapes a thin jacket over it that doesn’t quite match and decides the ensemble will have to do.

Adler sends a car for her at eight.

She hasn’t seen Fowler since they got back to the city in the morning; she resists the urge to stop by the other suite before she leaves, to say _tell Neal I said hey._ She lingers outside the door, waiting for the elevator, long enough to overhear Maurice: _slippery bastard wouldn’t even say where the meet’s gonna be, but he spent forty-five minutes last night casing this parking garage on Kenmare and Lafayette._

“You look lovely.” Adler leans in to brush a kiss on her cheek once she arrives; it’s somehow overly familiar and cold at the same time. “I trust your trip went well.”

“As well as could be expected.”

He’s got an entire suite on the upper level of the mission, with polished hardwood floors and luxurious carpets that wouldn’t have been out of place in his old offices. A large desk of carved oak dominates the center of the room, facing the window. If even one of the paintings hanging on the wall belongs to him, he’s clearly doing well for himself.

Not that she ever doubted it.

He’s watching her face as she looks at the paintings; she makes a point of giving each one a long stare, silently assessing the likely value until he waves her toward a round table by the door and pulls out her chair for her.

His voice is cool when he says, “My pilot was rather put out by the way he was treated.”

“Agent Fowler has many talents,” she says, “but I’m afraid tact isn’t one of them. Still, the plane was returned to you without any damage.”

Adler concedes that with a nod, removing a bottle of white wine from an ice bucket and pouring carefully for both of them.

She never should have asked for that plane. She should have found another one somewhere else; then she wouldn’t be here right now, trying to read her old boss, and wondering if she can con someone who’s known her since she was a college student.

“I hear you and Nick -” he smiles at his mistake, as a silent black-aproned waiter appears with two glass plates topped with an artful arrangement of arugula “- I’m sorry, he goes by Neal these days, I understand? I hear you’ve made quite a name for yourselves in the art world.”

“You could say that.”

Two long blue taper candles are lit between them; the napkins are stiff linen and the wine glasses crystal; she could fence the silver on the table and buy a car. (Not a very good one, but one that would get her across the Canadian border; she can’t not notice and catalogue these things.)

“I remember your father used to tell me about your drawings,” Adler is saying. 

The window at the far side of the room is cracked an inch, letting in a cold breeze; the flames grow and twist, casting shadows that jump and dance on the striped wallpaper, a constant flicker of motion barely perceived at the edge of her vision, keeping her on edge.

“He was always proud of your talent, you know. I’m not sure if he ever told you.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about my father,” she says sharply. “And I’m pretty sure you didn’t either.”

His face tightens in annoyance; it’s a familiar look, and she’s _this_ close to apologizing, falling back into old patterns of reading her boss and deferring to him without thinking.

She says, “Why don’t you tell me what you really want from me?”

“I think you could get to like Argentina.” And she wonders how she never saw the calculating condescension behind that tone, how she ever mistook his facade of paternal benevolence for respect. “You and Neal both. It would remove certain - complications - from both your lives.”

“I don’t doubt that,” she says.

She doesn’t go on; the slow ticking of the walnut grandfather clock is the only sound, punctuated by the clink of silver on glass. Eventually, the waiter takes away their salad plates, bringing out covered dishes with poached salmon and delightfully fragrant garlic mashed potatoes.

Neal would be turning on the charm, right now. Kate is silent for most of the meal; Adler pretends not to notice. 

He carries the conversation smoothly; she pastes on an expression of polite interest and knows he isn’t fooled, as he tells her about the night life in Buenos Aires and how much he’d love to see her paint the sunset over the pampas. The room is cold and she has no appetite; she’s jumpy and tense with old fury and long-sour betrayal, and beneath all that there’s a small voice telling her, quietly, to get up now and leave.

There is something in his face, looking at her, as if he’s studying a priceless work of art or some rare butterfly pinned under glass.

“I think you’d both fit in quite well with us,” he’s saying, when the waiter returns with dessert plates.

“Are you offering me a job?” she asks finally, and she doesn’t try to conceal the blunt disbelief behind the words.

“I think the two of you have skills I might find useful,” he says. “And you’ll find I have resources you don’t.”

“I’m sure.”

She’s walking a fine tightrope; she’s never liked chess, and this is chess played in the dark and blindfolded, and all the pieces are broken glass and cut her hands with every move.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she says. “I don’t have time for games tonight. And I don’t trust you.”

“Kate.” It’s quiet and affectionate and condescending at once.

She leans forward and nearly knocks over her wine glass. “You disappear with all my money and then you come back and you expect me to believe a word you say?”

“I hear you’re quite the accomplished thief yourself these days.” The edge is barely noticeable, a scalpel shaped in ice.

“I learned from the best.”

“You flatter me.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

“I’m curious,” he says, and then it comes out of nowhere; she’s rehearsed for this, but it still catches her off guard: “Why did you and Agent Fowler need a plane so urgently?”

She has one chance to sell this, and her and Neal’s lives may both rest on it. “We’re going to escape from the feds on a plane like that one,” she says. “We needed it to practice.”

“For what?” he asks. “Are you going to fly it?”

She has a round face and big blue eyes that a deft makeup hand can make even bigger; she knows these make her look younger than she is, and far more vulnerable. It’s something she’s capitalized on before. People _want_ to believe her. But at the end of the day she’s not a very good liar; she doesn’t have Neal’s skill, to sell an outright falsehood to a man already suspicious.

The best cons are mostly true, anyway.

“We’re going to jump out.”

It’s a risk, a gamble, a blind leap into the dark and a long way down, but she can tell from his face that she made the right call, the only call; he’s heard about the jump already.

“It’s a hell of a rush,” she says. “I wanted to practice at least once before Neal and I try it for real.” Something true, to lead smoothly into what isn’t. “We’re going to touch down in half a dozen different cities across Europe. The feds, Interpol, they won’t know where to start looking, and we won’t be in any of those cities anyway. Once we get far enough south we’re going to jump somewhere in between. Come ashore somewhere in the Mediterranean while they’re searching Dublin and Paris and Madrid.”

“Any particular piece of shoreline you’re considering?”

“Like I said, I don’t trust you.” She draws a line with her finger on the linen tablecloth, several short hops, a flight path and the wide circle of the Mediterranean.”But we’ll be relaxing under an olive tree somewhere warm while they’re searching half the major cities of Europe for us.” She looks up. “What do you think? You’re the master of the slick getaway.”

He gives her a cold smile, and she lets out a silent, shaky breath; he either bought it or he didn’t. “You’re trusting Agent Fowler to make all the arrangements, I take it?”

“I don’t trust anyone and that includes you.” She allows her voice to rise slightly. “But I know where I stand with Fowler. He’s never pretended to be my friend.”

“I still think you’d love Buenos Aires.”

She shakes her head sharply. “I don’t want a job with you.”

“What do you want?” he asks, and there’s a hook there, buried deep; she can feel it. She shouldn’t answer. “Tell me how I _can_ help.”

And she knows that tone, too, polite with a hint of reserved sympathy. The memory blindsides her, of the night her father died, dove-grey dusk lit by the first streetlights coming on and brittle red and orange leaves drifted across the walk leading up to her building, the smell of fall in the air; Adler drove her home from the hospital, walked her to her door, his eyes saying _I’m not going to push but I’m here if you need anything._

A small enough gesture, but she’d been alone, then, and it had meant everything.

Her fists curl together until her fingers hurt, crumpling the fine linen napkin on her lap. “I want what you took from us when you left seven years ago.”

She remembers a park bench and a long summer evening and a playful fit of whimsy, _I think you should blow off that commitment;_ Neal’s eyes holding her like he was afraid to blink, the soft wonder in his face at _I’m still here_. They’d both been so young.

She wants to believe there’s such a thing as safety, as security, for her and Neal. She wants to stop running; she wants to believe in a future more than three days ahead; she wants to not be angry and afraid all the time.

She wants to sleep in the dark and not dream she’s drowning; she wants to stop jumping at shadows and footsteps and every door opening; she wants to forget what it feels like to want to hurt someone.

“I’ll settle for the money that was in our accounts the day you emptied them,” she says, and it’s everything she’s wanted to say to her father, to Michael. _I don’t want your rescue. I don’t want your charity. I want nothing from you but what you owe me._ “With interest.”

It’s a child’s fantasy of justice; she knows that now. She is a thief and a survivor and she has long since abandoned any thought of debts repaid, of scores settled and justice done, of getting what she deserves.

In this life you get only what you are willing and able to take.

It’s a satisfying fantasy to act out, all the same.

Adler pulls an ATM card and a slip of paper from an inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll have it wired to this account by the end of the week,” he says. “Account number and password are right here; you should be able to access it wherever you end up.”

And he’ll be watching the account for a withdrawal; she sees the game now. Anything in it is poison and will blow their cover if they touch it.

She slips it into her belt and stands abruptly; Adler blinks, surprised, at the half-full wine glass and the cheesecake left on her plate. She has no desire to stay and finish dessert, or linger over coffee, or make small talk; she’s said what she came to say and she doesn’t think she can share a room with him much longer.

He doesn’t call after her; the limo is pulled up and waiting at the gate when she reaches it.

***

“Stop,” she tells the driver, barely a hundred yards from the hotel; she can see an agent in a trench coat by the doors, the faint glow of a cigarette in the dark as he looks up; he’s seen her.

The dashboard clock says 11:45. 

A cold wind slices through her thin jacket as she gets out of the car; the street is quiet. She’s not wearing shoes for walking quickly, but this agent isn’t a native New Yorker; she shouldn’t have to go far out of her way to lose him in the dark.

She hears Maurice, _spent forty-five minutes casing this parking garage,_ she hears _Kenmare and Lafayette_ and it’s fifteen minutes to midnight and she doesn’t want to think, doesn’t wait to ask herself if this is a good idea. It’s not survival instinct pulling her back up the street and into the shadows, away from the hotel.

It’s a still, small voice as strong and raw and impossible to ignore as the voice that says _run,_ as the voice that says _something isn’t right_ but it’s not that voice.

She walks quickly, slipping out of her shoes as she turns onto Lafayette; the heels will echo in the garage. A car passes, slowly, headlights sweeping up the street. She sees a feral cat dart from a corner as she enters the garage; it runs lightly down a ramp toward the lower level, turning to blink wide green eyes at her.

She thinks it might be the same voice that told Neal to break out, almost a year ago.

She sees him in a convex mirror near the ceiling as she creeps down a second ramp; it’s only slightly warmer, here, two levels down and out of the wind. She recognizes the silhouette of his hat against a pillar. His face is hidden, but she knows he’s alert for the slightest sound or stirring shadow; she’s seen him like this on too many jobs. 

She presses against the wall, gritty cement cold through her light jacket; it’s darker, here, halfway down the curving ramp. Not ideal for cover, but Neal will hear her if she moves.

Fowler is already here. A black car with government plates is parked not far away, screened by a few more support pillars but in a perfect position to watch Neal in that mirror. Neal hasn’t seen him yet.

Cracks run along the wall beneath the mirror, some of them patched, branching lines in irregular patterns. Rust and water stains spread in blotches where overhead pipes run into the concrete near the ceiling.

Another car approaches; she can recognize it from here, the tension in Neal’s absolute stillness, that says he’s desperate to pace, to work off extra nervous energy, to _act._ The second car stops; she can barely see the hood in the mirror. The sound of a door opening and closing rebounds off the walls of this industrial cavern, echoing and reechoing and seeming to come from everywhere at once.

Then Fowler and Maurice are walking past the front of the hood, distorted reflections in the mirror, and she freezes. Slowly, she turns to stare at the first car, still and silent with the doors closed; the overhead lights cast a glare on the driver’s window and she can’t see if anyone is inside.

Her attention is caught as Neal steps out from behind the pillar; she watches Maurice give him a cursory pat-down. His voice carries, warped by echoes chasing along the walls; she can’t make out the words but she knows that grin as he steps forward, leaning in toward Fowler. She sees an edge, there, something hard and fragile and desperate; he’s as stretched thin and pushed to the wall as she is, and as terrified for her as she is for him.

She isn’t here to overhear their conversation; she’s here to see Neal, to read him, and she doesn’t like what she sees.

She recognizes that look, as his face is caught by the light; she’s seen it in her own mirror; she’s seen it in Fowler’s eyes not too long ago, the look of some wild thing backed too far into a corner with nowhere else to go but out and swinging.

“I don’t give a damn what you do, Caffrey,” Fowler says at last, raising his voice as he backs away; his eyes hold Neal’s, still, and she knows all communication here has been unspoken. They both know there are cameras all throughout the garage. “Just don’t make it my problem.”

Then Fowler and Maurice are out of sight; she hears the car doors closing again, watches the headlights sweep over the walls as the car turns.

Neal looks around him; for a second she has the feeling he’s looking straight at her, like he can see her. Then he turns and walks quickly toward the exit.

She’s still hearing the sound of his footsteps disappearing, the strangled echoes of everything she wants to say, when another engine starts with a cough.

The first black car pulls out from the shelter of those pillars and turns toward the lower exit; she tries to follow but it’s gone before she can catch a glimpse of the plate.

Someone was watching.

***

Fowler is on her balcony when she returns.

She leans against the door as she closes it, still shivering, and doesn’t turn on the light. She wants to be alone, to sit up with a glass of wine and go over chute specs until she can forget the strained look on Neal’s face, until the sun peeks blearily over the distant office buildings.

She kicks her shoes into a corner and pulls a bottle out of the minibar as the sliding door shuts with a thud.

“Now what the hell are you trying to pull?”

She closes her eyes, gathers up frayed shreds of calm. “I beg your pardon?”

“Adler’s limo brought you back at 11:45.” It’s cold and suspicious and she is so very not in the mood for this tonight. “You disappeared for forty-five minutes after that. Where were you?”

She stabs at the bottle with a corkscrew as he comes into the tiny kitchen. “Parking garage at Kenmare and Lafayette.”

“I was there.” His eyebrows go up. “I didn’t see you.”

“You weren’t supposed to.” Her voice stays steady and she’s proud of that; she’s glad it’s too dark for him to see her face. “Did you see the second car?”

“What second car?”

“Black. Government plates.” Her voice is steady but her hands are shaking badly enough that she mangles the cork, breaking off half of it and leaving the other half stuck in the neck of the bottle.

She slams the corkscrew down on the counter, bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, breathes out slowly and stares at her hands. Swallows back _I don’t have to explain myself to you_ and the hard, sharp swirl of fury that’s been building since she saw Adler.

“I wanted to see him.”

And there’s a crack in the last word but her eyes meet his and it’s an admission of weakness and a challenge at once, a spiked gauntlet thrown down, daring him to make something of the opening.

Something dark flickers behind his eyes; he turns away, flips on the light over the sink and takes up the corkscrew, pulling the bottle away from her. He takes his time, carefully and silently extracting the remains of the cork before he says, without looking up, “Did you get the plate number?”

And like that the anger fades, leaving her drained and tired. “Couldn’t get close enough without being seen.”

“How was dinner?” In the light he looks as exhausted as she feels.

“You know, it’s hard to really enjoy New York’s most expensive cheesecake when you’re wondering the whole time if your host is plotting to kill you.” She sighs. “I told him the best story I could come up with. I don’t know if he bought it.”

“He’s still staying at the mission, I take it?”

“Oh, yes. He’s not stupid. And he’s got connections; they’ve got him set up with a whole suite, there. Very fancy.”

“The two of you were together in his suite the whole time?”

She tilts her head at him with a sharp, exasperated frown. “What are you, a _chaperone_?”

“He didn’t excuse himself any time between, say, nine and nine fifteen?” The words are patient, edged. “To make a phone call, perhaps?”

The temperature in the room drops several degrees. She shakes her head slowly. “Doesn’t mean he’s not involved.”

“The plane’s in the air right now,” Fowler says; he pulls out his phone and sets it on the counter. “It’ll land tonight somewhere in New Jersey. Keep that with you.” He nods toward the phone. “ _Don’t_ answer it. Keep the chain on the door and don’t open it for anyone until I get back.”

“You’re going out to load the plane?”

“And make the final - modifications.” He opens his wallet, now, flips through half a dozen credit cards and driver’s licenses; he tucks one of each into an inside pocket of his coat and leaves the wallet with the phone. “If all goes according to plan, you’ll be out of here by the end of the week.”

She swallows, caught between anticipation and a sudden twist of cold fear; the Italian consulate is hosting a party this week. _So much for hoping it’s at someone’s private home._ Security at the consulate will be a challenge even for Neal, and if he’s caught -

She can’t think about that now.

Fowler writes something on a pad of hotel stationery and slides it toward her; it’s another phone number. “If you absolutely have to reach me in the next six hours,” he says. “Memorize that and then burn it. If anyone asks I was here the whole night.”

She nods once and opens the door, darting a quick glance into the hallway. “It’s clear.”

He disappears into the stairwell.

***

He returns without incident just before sunrise and says only that everything’s ready.

They don’t go out to the pool again, but they spend some four hours in her room that evening putting the parachute harnesses on and taking them off again, until her hands know the motions and she thinks she could do it blindfolded.

After that she’s too wired to sleep most of the rest of the night; she catches a brief nap around 7 AM, and by 10 she’s downstairs and on her second espresso.

She leaves the cafe and settles in one the overstuffed armchairs before the fireplace, close enough that she can stretch her feet out and feel the warmth. Flames dance above a gas jet, bright gold fading to blue at the base, suspended over a not-very-convincing pile of fake logs.

The snow is gone; a brief warm spell has melted it, and a cold drizzle has descended to wash away the rest. From the lounge she can see into the lobby, the street outside framed by rain-streaked glass doors. 

She sits and tries to draw the scene, pedestrians on the sidewalk, dark umbrellas like overturned teacups, pen and ink on a tiny rectangle of hotel stationery but the lines are disjointed and refuse to come together.

She gives up when she notices three agents lurking near the elevators.

The elevator dings and Maurice comes out to join them, just as Fowler pushes through the revolving doors at the front entrance. “Did you get it?”

Maurice holds up a paper. “Fax came through ten minutes ago.”

“Burke was in the second car.” This is addressed to her, as Fowler waves the other agents ahead toward the door. She sits up with a start.

“He knows Neal is up to something.” And dammit, she should have known better than to tell him about the music box. But she hadn’t dared speak of it over the phone, and Neal probably would have told him anyway.

“I’ve got this,” Fowler says. And then, shaking his head in frustration, “He’s got no idea what he’s sticking his nose into this time.”

“Do _not_ underestimate him.” It comes out sharper than she intended, but she knows Burke better than he does. “He may be honest but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. He’s dangerous. He _knows_ Neal and he believes in what he’s doing.”

He thinks he’s saving Neal from himself; he’s going to get Neal killed, if they’re not careful.

“I said I can handle Burke,” Fowler says, sharply.

She glares at him. “You’d better,” she says. “If he screws this up -”

“He won’t.” He gathers the rest of the agents behind him with a look, and they sweep out through the front doors; she watches them vanish, a flock of black trench coats like dark birds against the wet sidewalk.

After her third espresso she gives up waiting and retreats upstairs; she’s sitting in a chair in front of the balcony doors, watching the rain taper off and the clouds part, studying a map of the Irish coast. She hears the elevator first and then the growl of the ice machine at the end of the hall.

Fowler comes in with a split lip and a bruise on his jaw, holding a handful of ice cubes wrapped in a handkerchief against his mouth and looking decidedly pleased with himself. She closes the door and puts the chain back on, leans against the wall and says, “What the hell happened to you?”

“You should see the other guy.”

“What did you do, break his arms?”

“Took his badge.” He leans against the kitchen counter; there’s a glitter of adrenaline and triumph in his eyes, and he lowers the handkerchief long enough to give her an edged grin; blood and ice water drips on the tile floor. “Agent Burke gets a hearing in two weeks, and they’ll decide if he gets it back. Until then he won’t be arresting anybody.”

“Burke took a swing at you?” She stares at Fowler, stunned at such a gift being dropped in their laps; so much for Burke not being stupid.

“In front of half a dozen witnesses.”

“How’d you manage that?” she demands, with a huff of stunned, delighted laughter. “Not that I can’t understand the impulse, of course.”

“Someone called in an anonymous tip -” and the first word is emphasized in a way that suggests that someone is hardly unknown to him “- alleging Burke Premier Events has been violating half a dozen import restrictions on all kinds of expensive foreign foods.”

“You took his office apart looking for absinthe and contraband Swedish caviar? What on earth is he doing with - wait.” She frowns. _Burke Premier Events -_ “That’s his wife’s company.” She blinks at his fraction of a nod. “Are you telling me you arrested his wife?”

“These are serious allegations.”

“You _arrested_ his _wife._ ” She stops, caught by a sudden realization; her slow, incredulous smile is bright and fierce and not nice at all. “And he punched you in the face.”

“I told you I could handle him.”

“You -” The next words are quiet, deliberate, despite the singing, angry joy bubbling up from some place too long helpless inside her: “You used the woman he loves to set a trap for him.”

He turns and spits blood into the sink. “Does that bother you?”

“No.” It’s soft and rough and heartfelt and she thinks _this,_ this _is what it feels like to want to hurt someone._ “No, I want him to know how it felt.”

She can still hear the bang of the door opening in that storage unit, a flood of bright light released and as suddenly blocked by men with guns. She can still close her eyes and see Burke, alone after Neal was taken, his satisfied smirk as he looked at her; she’d been a tool, in his eyes, and one that had served his purpose.

“You’d better watch it, Fowler,” she says, quiet and dangerous.

Both eyebrows go up as he lowers the handkerchief; that’s going to leave an impressive bruise, she can tell already. “Oh?”

“I might actually start to like you.”

“There’s a frightening thought.”

“Tell me about it.”

***

The Italian consulate hosts a party three nights later.

Kate is packed long before then; her bag is ready to leave, ready to stow in the crate to be shoved out of the plane. It sits in the corner of her room, by the head of the bed, and whispers to her in the dark.

The night of the party she spends an hour running on the treadmill in the hotel’s tiny fitness center, until the nervous stress wears off and her mind grows tired of spinning over the extended metaphor of futility. Running like a rat on a wheel, weaving plans in the light and pulling frayed threads of doubt in the dark until it all unravels. 

She doesn't know anymore if she's the weaver and the anchor and the safe harbor, or if she's the storm-tossed traveler washed up unrecognized on a familiar shore, gone so far and so long even the eyes of love won't know her anymore.

It’s dark outside the main doors when she leaves the treadmill behind; the clock over the fireplace in the lounge says it’s nearly nine.

There’s a miniature Christmas tree tucked in one corner of the lobby.

A pair of uniformed desk clerks - she recognizes most of them, by now - are stringing a twisting rope of gold tinsel and plastic evergreen over the mantel, hanging a row of identical red velvet stockings edged with silver sequins.

“It’s not even Thanksgiving,” she says, staring around her at the transformation in the lobby. It’s not addressed to anyone, but one of the clerks beside the fireplace looks up from arranging fake pine cones; recognizing her, he offers a “what can you do?” shrug.

She finds Fowler in the bar, where tiny white lights peek like stars strung around potted plants in all the corners, but at least the elevator-music rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is somewhat drowned by the TV in the corner.

Maybe she and Neal will be in the south of France for Christmas. She remembers Neal saying _you’d like France._ They’ll hole up in a quiet villa by the shore, order expensive room service and spend the day in bed, relearning each other’s skin and mapping all the new scars that weren’t there before.

“I swear it starts earlier every year.” She leans against the bar beside Fowler.

Maybe they’ll go to Paris and pretend to be tourists, lose themselves in the crowds at the Louvre.

Fowler looks up and says, quietly, “Your boy’s off his leash.”

He pulls out his phone, opens a short text message. An unknown number, only four words.

_After a prize tonight._

She looks away, stares at their warped reflections in the polished brass panel behind the bar and swallows the sharp sting of tears. That message is from Neal, and it’s for her.

“’But I will be back with the yellow gold before the morning light’,” she whispers. Fowler frowns at her and she shakes her head. “Just an old poem.”

It’s a classic, and an old favorite, one they’ve both memorized; a tale of theft and doomed love that cuts sharper, now, than it once did. Still it’s an old token, between them: _I’ll come to thee by moonlight though hell should bar the way._

It’s quiet; the bartender wipes down the surface of the bar and only nods a greeting. She can barely hear the hum of a vacuum cleaner in the dining room.

Maybe they’ll lay low in Ireland for a while. Spend long evenings together in the corner of some warm, wood-paneled pub beside a roaring fire, listening to the waves outside, two shipwrecked souls swapping war stories. She can close her eyes, imagine wandering with him along a narrow path, dew-drenched hills sparkling like wet polished emerald, fog rolling back like antique silver.

Maybe they’ll head south, follow the tourists to Malta and then to Italy.

It still seems unreal; she thinks of home and she sees that visiting room; she’s swept by a fierce, ridiculous nostalgia for that glass, smudged with a thousand fingerprints, futile gestures of longing. She thinks of a reunion and she sees him in the doorway of her storage unit; all the happy endings are woven in frost and spider-silk, melted with a breath and torn away by careless hands.

She thinks if only she can have Neal alone, truly alone together with no one watching, she'll never lie to him again.

Part of her knows that isn't true. She also knows it doesn't matter; she'll lie to him, and he'll lie to her, but she'll never doubt his love again, or give him reason to doubt hers. Surely enough love, enough blood and sweat and pain spent in returning home can substitute for honesty.

She thinks of hope and imagines huddling with Neal in the shadow of a rock, soaked through and barely sheltered from the salt wind and listening to the ocean pound the shore, cheated of its prize and raging as the smoke from the explosion spreads a gauzy haze between them and the stars.

She wants to feel him breathing. She wants to hear him say he loves her. (He never lied about that, he said, and she believed him.)

She sighs, slowly, sinking onto a stool beside Fowler and leaning her elbows on the bar.

“Scotch on the rocks,” she tells the bartender.

Neither one of them will be sleeping tonight, waiting for Neal’s signal. They might as well stay up and watch the phone together.

***

Sunrise comes and goes and there’s no word from Neal. It’s late afternoon by the time she hears anything; Fowler has gone in to the office and she’s upstairs; she’s finally dozed off in an armchair by the door when Fowler calls her.

He lets the phone ring once and hangs up; it’s a signal. A green light. All systems go.

She jumps up, grabs her bag and her coat and does a last quick check around the room for anything she might want to destroy and then realizes she has nothing more to do; she’s been packed and ready to go at five seconds’ notice for the past three days.

She paces back and forth across the tiny living room until Fowler arrives.

He shuts the door and chains it, walks into the bedroom without a greeting. She follows and he shuts that door, too, and closes the blinds over the window. He drops two black duffel bags on the bed, opens the larger one and drags out two parachutes.

She stares at the smaller duffel. “Is that -?”

He nods once. “Focus.” He tosses a chute at her and she catches it by reflex. “Show me how you’ll put Caffrey’s chute on.”

She slips the shoulder harness over his arms, pauses to let him shake open a folded square of paper; it flutters and spreads over half the end of the bed.

“What’s that?”

“Waterproof map,” he says, and as she leans closer, “Don’t stop. And pay attention. You’re going to have to be able to multitask, here.”

She tightens the straps down as he goes on, tracing a line across the grey shaded space of the Atlantic.

“You’ll take off from here. Weather report says there’s snow moving in off Newfoundland late tonight, but if you get out of here soon you should be able to land and refuel and take off again before it hits. The pilot already has the course heading.”

“What’s his name?”

“The pilot?” Fowler looks up from the map; his eyes are tired and serious. “Do you really want to know his name?”

She feels like she should want to; she’s going to point a gun at the man. She closes her eyes and shakes her head briefly. She says, softly, “Neal hates guns.”

“He’s lucky he has you, then.”

She wonders if Neal will recognize her; she wonders if she can hold a gun on a man while he watches.

But she only snaps, “Will you hold still?” The words are low and rough; she stands in front of him, tightening the harness and weaving the chest straps over the life vest when it hits her.

In less than twelve hours she’ll be standing this close to Neal. Securing the net in place that will catch him when he falls, holding his life in her hands. She has to stop, has to steady her hands and her breathing; if Fowler can tell her eyes are wet, when she looks up, he doesn’t let on.

“If my advice is worth anything,” he says at last, “do whatever you have to do to keep him alive. He can’t forgive you anything if he’s dead.”

He turns away as she steps back; he folds the map and stows it back in the duffel, before turning toward the full-length mirror behind her door to inspect the harness and check her work.

She says, quietly, “Are you giving me relationship advice?”

“Something like that.” Now he’s shrugging out of the harness, nodding toward the other lying on the bed. “Now yours.”

She slides into her own harness, her hands moving automatically as he continues.

“About half a mile out you’re going to turn and head north along the coast. That’s where you set the autopilot and the pilot jumps out. You two follow twenty minutes later. You want to time it so you’re out at least fifteen minutes before it blows; that way you won’t have flaming wreckage and half the Irish coast guard coming down on your heads. And remember, anything you say in or near the cockpit is being recorded. Don’t assume they won’t find the black box. And make sure -”

He stops; they stare at each other for a moment, and she knows they’re thinking the same thing.

Most likely all three of them will be dead this time tomorrow.

“’’Tis true there’s better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it’,” she quotes softly, and he shows his teeth in a cold grin; he knows the sentiment, if not the poem. She asks, “Supplies?”

“Everything’s in two crates on the plane. The gear and the boat for the pilot are by the door; yours are on the other side.”

“What about wet suits?”

He nods toward the duffel; inside she sees three black wet suits, a pistol and a bulletproof vest.

“You’re going straight from the airstrip to make the handoff,” she realizes.

“Yeah.” His voice is hoarse but steady.

“Any idea who you’re meeting?” A shrug, and she asks, “What if he shoots you in the head?”

His only answer is another shrug, before he turns to inspect her harness. “Not much I can do about that.”

He pulls the vest out and shoves the chutes back into the bag, turning away to peel out of his shirt. She moves toward the mirror, drags a brush through her hair a few times and decides to leave it down. 

Neal likes it that way. She can put it up once they’re in the air.

He gets his arms through the vest before his phone rings; he flips it open with one hand as she steps toward him. “Fowler.”

She bats his other hand aside, does up the velcro fastenings to tighten the vest in place herself.

“Did she get anything?” he’s asking, and then, quietly, “Dammit.”

“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” she says, as he hangs up.

“Not you.” He takes out the pistol and zips the duffel closed before buttoning his shirt. “Someone just copied the hard drive off my laptop at the office.”

“There wasn’t anything on there about -?” She glances, alarmed, at the bag with the parachutes.

“No.” He checks the pistol quickly, sliding home the magazine. “But if he’s got people looking into my files it means we’ve made him suspicious.”

“You think whoever it was works for -”

“She didn’t show a warrant when Maurice walked in on her,” he says grimly. Which suggests this isn’t coming through official channels, Kate thinks. “Doesn’t change anything. Just all the more reason we need to hurry.”

She lifts the larger duffel and swings it over her shoulder; he grabs the smaller one and they head for the stairs.

***

The airstrip is deserted.

Fowler pulls up outside a hangar and holds up a hand when she goes to open the door. Draws his gun and gets out quickly, disappearing inside the building.

He reappears a moment later, waving at her to get out, _it’s clear._ She drags the duffel out of the back seat and settles it on her shoulder. The sky is clear, pale blue shading to white at the horizon, but she can smell snow in the wind.

Inside the hangar her footsteps echo and she shivers. Fowler snaps his cell phone closed, following her. “Tower says the plane is twenty minutes out. Caffrey should be here in an hour.”

“He has the passports?”

Fowler nods and pulls something else out of his coat; it looks like another cell phone, at first, but it’s not.

“Is that -?” She takes it from him; the display is dark, and she’s careful not to touch the keypad.

“Detonator.” He points at one key, then another: “This starts the timer; this will pause it, if there’s any delay. Once it starts you’ve got four hours.”

She glances at the corners of the ceiling; she doesn’t see any cameras. Still she tucks it quickly into an inside pocket of her coat.

Fowler walks back out to the car, and she pauses in the doorway as he reaches in through the passenger side window. He pulls a second gun out of the glove box and offers it to her.

“You prepared to use this?”

She swallows. “Yes.” _If I have to._ Checks it and sticks it in the back of her pants.

“You’re _not_ jumping with that,” he says. “Leave it on the plane. I don’t have time to show you how to properly secure a -”

He stops. There’s no more time, and only so much instruction she can absorb in the next twenty minutes.

“Feet and knees together,” she says, and that gets her half a smile, fading quickly.

“I hope you make it.”

It’s quiet and sincere; she looks up and meets his eyes steadily. She can hear geese overhead, honking in the cold air, the last flight out before winter sets in hard.

He lifts a hand, as if he’s about to clasp her shoulder, and then lets it fall to rest on the roof of the car.

He’ll never know, either way; she’ll never know if he survives making the handoff, or if he can take out whoever is behind this before they get him.

She can’t think of that, now, or wonder if their odd and painful alliance might be called friendship.

“I hope so, too,” she says finally. “Good luck.”

She stands in the doorway and watches the car drive away, until he’s out of sight and she’s alone.

One hour and Neal will be here. She leans against the door and tries not to think of all that can go wrong between now and then; she tells herself once Neal is _here_ they’ll be all right. Nothing can stop them.

If she were a better liar she might be able to convince herself that’s true.

She’s leaving New York for good, this time, and leaving Kate Moreau as well. Neal has her new name tucked in a folder, but she hasn’t seen it; she doesn’t know who she is. But they’ll reinvent themselves together, just like they did seven years ago, when she left everything to follow him into a world unknown to her.

Despite everything, she still can’t bring herself to wish she’d gone to Chicago.

She’d be on her way home now, if she had, to warm house with a fire going and no doubt in her mind about what her name was or who might recognize her, with nothing to stress about except upcoming holiday parties and the insistence of local stations on starting the Christmas music two months early.

She might have gone with Neal to Copenhagen; they might have stolen the music box together, sold it somewhere and bought that villa in the Cote d’Azur. They might be walking along a path above the ocean, right now, making plans for a holiday on some remote island somewhere.

Instead she’s standing on an empty airstrip, staring up into a crystal blue autumn sky, watching for an airplane with a bomb strapped to it flying in low over the Hudson.

This is not the time for regrets.

***

She and the pilot exchange cursory greetings; he looks mildly surprised to see her. Given the secretive nature of his orders, he probably expected a Special Forces team to be waiting on the tarmac. Or maybe he thinks she’s CIA.

But he only says, “Ma’am,” and “I was told I’ll be briefed in the air.”

He doesn’t offer his name, and she doesn’t ask.

She tells him to keep the engine running, and checks behind the seats to find the gear and the boats tucked out of sight. She stows the duffel with the chutes behind them and doesn’t look under the seat by the door.

The sky is clouded over, now, a low ceiling of white heavy with snow. A car engine purrs to a halt, then stops. Shadows move between the hangar buildings.

And Neal is here, his steps quickening as he approaches, as he sees her in the doorway. She raises a hand, a tentative wave; he waves back, and his smile is eager and bright and hopeful and only a little bit uncertain and her heart twists and thumps hard, startling tears to her eyes.

Someone calls his name.

Burke.

 _No._ She steps back. _No. Not this time._

Her legs hit the back of the front seat and she sits, peers out the window and feels the hard metal of the gun digging into the small of her back.

_You son of a bitch, you told me he was on suspension for two weeks …_

She leans her head against the window, sick fear clawing at her. She doesn’t see a SWAT team; she doesn’t see anyone else at all. Burke seems to be alone.

Still she recognizes it, that sudden cold certainty when a heist is about to go south fast. Something isn’t right.

She pulls out her phone, hides it under her jacket on her lap and texts Fowler: _Burke is here WTF is going on?_

Burke holds his hands out, in a gesture of _I’m unarmed,_ and abruptly she realizes: he _is_ still on suspension. He’s not here to arrest Neal; he honestly thinks he can persuade him to stay.

She hears her own words, echoed back: _he can be your prisoner or he can be your friend._ They’re speaking as equals for the first time, she realizes - Burke without his badge, and Neal free to go with a deal approved by OPR.

And Neal stops, and listens.

Alarm bells are still ringing, and her phone is silent. She paces up and down the aisle, and punches in the number for the burner Fowler carried when he went to load the plane.

She’s not really expecting an answer; it’s been nearly an hour since he left, more than enough time for him to have met with his contact.

“Yes?”

The voice is Adler’s, and the alarm bells rise to a steady white-noise shriek. She can think of only a few reasons why he’d be answering this phone; none of them bode well for her or Neal, and most involve Fowler being already dead.

She shoves that thought to the back of her mind, files it away as something she will probably have feelings about later, but can’t afford to right now.

“It’s me,” she says, pausing as thoughts tumble furiously over one another. Her eyes move from the pilot - the cockpit door is not yet closed - to the window where Neal stands frozen, and she wonders how far things have already unraveled and if there’s still a chance to fix this.

“Kate,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

 _You,_ she thinks; _I don’t trust you._ “Peter Burke is here.”

Adler’s voice sharpens. “Why? Does he have it with him?”

“I don’t know why Burke’s here,” and it’s stalling, as she races to figure out what’s going on here. Does he have _what -_? And then, testing, deliberately vague, “Does this change the plan?”

She’s half expecting him to demand a bribe, some kind of payment to look the other way. Or maybe - maybe his hosts at the mission have thrown him out of his sanctuary, and he’s looking for an escape route and wants a seat on the plane -

“I know he’s got the box,” Adler says, and something drops out of the bottom of her stomach. “Was this your plan all along? The three of you take off with it and disappear? You think you can screw me -”

 _It_ is _you_.

She closes the phone with a snap, tries to breathe through a sudden flood of panic. He’s been their mastermind all along. And now he thinks Burke has the music box (how? why? and where is Fowler?) and they’re all running away with it.

_Oh God Neal get on the damn plane we don’t have time for this._

Adler’s people will be on their way any minute.

Neal finally turns away from Burke, walking slowly toward her only to stop, on the tarmac, in the open, staring at the sky.

Adler’s people could be here already; he could have guys watching airstrip; her eyes dart toward the roofs of the nearby hangars, looking for snipers. Snow is starting to fall.

They have to go now.

She half expects to see a red laser dot appear on his forehead, on the front of his wool jacket, but there’s only snowflakes caught like broken glass in his hair.

_Neal, please._

Later, she swears, staring hard at him and willing their old telepathy to work one last time, later she’ll listen to him talk until he’s hoarse about why Burke isn’t so bad after all, and how he misses working cases in New York. She’ll hold him while he cries, if he needs to, once they’ve reached a place of safety.

But that place isn’t here. And now they can think only of survival.

Adler almost certainly has people on the way who mean to kill them both. 

She leans close to the window. Neal pauses and turns, looking back at Burke, torn.

Neal was the one who brought her into this world, but some of its lessons he still hasn’t learned. You can hold tightly to only a few people in this life; with everyone else, you have to let go and not look back.

And there is never time enough to say goodbye.


End file.
